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PEEFATORY NOTE. 

The materials for a biography of Sterne are by no means 
abundant. Of the earlier years of his life the only exist- 
ing record is that preserved in the brief autobiographical 
memoir which, a few months before his death, he com- 
posed, in the usual quaint staccato style of his familiar cor- 
respondence, for the benefit of his daughter. Of his child- 
hood ; of his school-days ; of his life at Cambridge, and in 
his Yorkshire vicarage ; of his whole history, in fact, up to 
the age of forty-six, we know nothing more than he has 
there jotted down. He attained that age in the year 1759 ; 
and at this date begins that series of his Letters, from 
which, for those who have the patience to sort them out 
of the chronological confusion in which his daughter and 
editress involved them, there is, no doubt, a good deal to 
be learnt. These letters, however, which extend down to 
1768, the year of the writer's death, contain pretty nearly 
all the contemporary material that we have to depend on. 
Freely as Sterne mixed in the best literary society, there is 
singularly little to be gathered about him, even in the way 
of chance allusion and anecdote, from the memoirs and ana 
of his time. Of the many friends who would have been 
competent to write his biography while the facts were yet 
fresh, but one, John Wilkes, ever entertained — if he did 
seriously entertain — the idea of performing this pious 
work ; and he, in spite of the entreaties of Sterne's widow 



Ti PREFATORY NOTE. 

and daughter, then in straitened circumstances, left unre- 
deemed his promise to do so. The brief memoir by Sir 
Walter Scott, which is prefixed to many popular editions 
of Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey^ sets out 
the so-called autobiography in full, but for the rest is main- 
ly critical ; Thackeray's well-known lecture-essay is almost 
wholly so ; and nothing, worthy to be dignified by the 
name of a Life of Sterne^ seems ever to have been pub- 
lished, untiJ the appearance of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's two 
stout volumes, under this title, some eighteen years ago. 
Of this work it is hardly too much to say that it contains 
(no doubt with the admixture of a good deal of superflu- 
ous matter) nearly all the information as to the facts of 
Sterne's life that is now ever likely to be recovered. The 
evidence for certain of its statements of fact is not as thor- 
oughly sifted as it might have been ; and with some of its 
criticism I, at least, am unable to agree. But no one inter- 
ested in the subject of this memoir can be insensible of his 
obligations to Mr. Fitzgerald for the fruitful diligence with 
which he has laboured in a too long neglected field. 

H. D. T. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

(1T13-1724.) p^Q^ 

Birth, Parentage, and Early Years 1 

CHAPTER II. 

(1T24-173S.) 

School and University. — Halifax and Cambridge . 11 
CHAPTER III. 

(1T38-1759.) 

Life at Sutton.— Marriage.— The Parish Priest . 20 

CHAPTER IV. 

(1759-1760.) 

''Tristram Shandy," Yols. I. and II 33 

CHAPTER Y. 

(1760-1762.) 

London Triumphs. — First Set of Sermons. — ''Tris- 
tram Shandy," Yols. III. and IY. — Coxwold. — 
"Tristram Shandy," Yols. Y. and YI. — First Yisit 
to the Continent. — Paris. — Toulouse ..... 49 



viii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER yi. 

(1762-1765.) 

PAGE 

Life in the South. — Return to England. — *' Tris- 
tram Shandy," Vols. VII. and VIII.— Second Set 
OF Sermons 75 

CHAPTER VII. 

(1765-1768.) 

France and Italy. — Meeting with Wife and Daugh- 
ter.— Return TO England.— ''Tristram Shandy," 
Vol. IX. — ''The Sentimental Journey" .... 103 

CHAPTER VIII. 

(1768.) 

Last Days and Death 117 

CHAPTER IX. 

Sterne as a Writer. — The Charge op Plagiarism. 
— Dr. Ferriar's "Illustrations" 126 

CHAPTER X. 

Style and General Characteristics.— Humour and 
Sentiment 139 

CHAPTER XL 

Creative and Dramatic Power. — Place in English 
Literature 164 



STERNE. 



CHAPTER I. 

BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 
(1713-1724.) 

Towards the close of the month of November, 1713, one 
of the last of the English regiments which had been de- 
tained in Flanders to supervise the execution of the treaty 
of Utrecht arrived at Clonmel from Dunkirk. The day 
after its arrival the regiment was disbanded; and yet a 
few days later, on the 24th of the month, the wife of one 
of its subalterns gave birth to a son. The child who thus 
early displayed the. perversity of his humour by so inop- 
portune an appearance was Laurence Sterne. " My 
birthday," he says, in the slipshod, loosely-strung notes by 
which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have 
" anticipated the labours " of the biographer — " my birth- 
day was ominous to my poor father, who was the day after 
our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent 
adrift into the wide world with a wife and two children." 
Roger Sterne, however, now late ensign of the 34th, or 
Chudleigh's regiment of foot, was after all in less evil case 
than were many, probably, of his comrades. He had kins- 
1* 



2* ■ STERNE. [chap. 

men to whom he could look for, at any rate, temporary 
assistance, and his mother was a wealthy widow. The 
Sternes, originally of a Suffolk stock, had passed from that 
county to Nottinghamshire, and thence into Yorkshire, and 
were at this time a family of position and substance in the 
last-named count v. Roo-er's Q;randfather had been Arch- 
bishop of York, and a man of more note, if only through 
the accident of the times upon which he fell, than most of 
the incumbents of that see. He had played an exception- 
ally energetic part even for a Cavalier prelate in the great 
political struggle of the seventeenth century, and had suf- 
fered with fortitude and dignity in the royal cause. He 
had, moreover, a further claim to distinction in having been 
treated with common gratitude at the Restoration by the 
son of the monarch whom he had served. As Master of 
Jesus College, Cambridge, he had " been active in sending 
the University plate to -his Majesty," and for this offence 
he was seized by Cromwell and carried in military custody 
to London, whence, after undergoing imprisonment in va- 
rious gaols, and experiencing other forms of hardship, he 
was at length permitted to retire to an obscure retreat in 
the country, there to commune with himself until that 
tyranny should be overpast. On the return of the exiled 
Stuarts Dr. Sterne was made Bishop of Carlisle, and a few 
years later was translated to the see of York. He lived 
to the age of eighty-six, and so far justified Burnet's accu- 
sation against him of *' minding chiefly enriching himself," 
that he seems to have divided no fewer than four landed 
estates among his children. One of these, Simon Sterne, 
a younger son of the Archbishop, himself married an heir- 
ess, the daughter of Sir Roger Jaques of Elvington ; and 
Roger, the father of Laurence Sterne, was the seventh and 
youngest of the issue of this marriage. At the time when' 



I ] BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 3 

the double misfortuTie above recorded befell him at the 
hands of Liicina and the War Office, his father had been 
some years dead ; but Simon Sterne's widow was still mis- 
tress of the property which she had brought with her at 
her marriage, and to Elvington, accordingly, " as soon," 
writes Sterne, " as I was able to be carried," the compul- 
sorily retired ensign betook himself with his wife and his 
two children. He was not, however, compelled to remain 
long dependent on his mother. The ways of the military 
authorities were as inscrutable to the army of that day as 
they are in our day to our own. Before a year had passed 
the regiment was ordered to be re-established, and " our 
household decamped with bag and baggage for Dublin." 
This was in the autumn of 1714, and from that time on- 
ward, for some eleven years, the movements and fortunes 
of the Sterne family, as detailed in the narrative of its 
most famous member, form a history in which the ludi- 
crous struggles strangely with the pathetic. 

A husband, condemned to be the Ulysses-like plaything 
of adverse gods at the War Office ; an indefatigably pro- 
lific wife ; a succession of weak and ailing children ; mis- 
fortune in the seasons of journeying; misfortune in the 
moods of the weather bv sea and land — under all this 
combination of hostile chances and conditions was the 
struggle to be carried on. ■» The little household was per- 
petually " on the move " — a little household which was 
always becoming and never remaining bigger — continual- 
ly increased by births, only to be again reduced by deaths 
— until the contest between the deadly hardships of trav- 
el and the fatal fecundity of Mrs. Sterne was brought by 
events to a natural close. Almost mio-ht the unfortunate 
lady have exclaimed, Qum regio in terris nostri non plena 
lahoris ? She passes from Ireland to England, and from 



4 STERNE. [chap. 

England to Ireland, from inland garrison to sea-port town 
and back again, incessantly bearing and incessantly bury- 
ing children — until even her son in his narrative begins to 
speak of losing one infant at this place, and " leaving an- 
other behind " on that journey, almost as if they were so 
many overlooked or misdirected articles of luggage. The 
tragic side of the history, however, overshadows the gro- 
tesque. When we think how hard a business was travel 
even under the most favourable conditions in those days, 
and how serious even in our own times, when travel is 
easy, are the discomforts of the women and children of a 
regiment on the march — we may well pity these unrest- 
ing followers of the drum. As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she 
seems to have been a woman of a pretty tough fibre, and 
she came moreover of a campaigning stock. Her father 
was a " noted suttler " of the name of Nuttle, and her first 
husband — for she was a widow when Roger Sterne married 
her^ — had been a soldier also. She had, therefore, served 
some years' apprenticeship to the military life before these 
wanderings began ; and she herself was destined to live 
to a good old age. But somehow or other she failed to 
endow her offspring with her own robust constitution and 
powers of endurance. " My father's children were," as 
Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, " not made to last long ;" 
but one cannot help suspecting that it was the hardships 
of those early years which carried them off in their infan- 
cy with such painful regularity and despatch, and that it 
was to the same cause that their surviving brother owed 
the beginnings of that fatal malady by which his own life 
was cut short. 

The diary of their travels — for the early part of Sterne's 
memoirs amounts to scarcely more — is the more effective 
for its very brevity and abruptness. Save for one interval 



I.] BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 6 

of somewhat longer sojourn than usual at Dublin, the read- 
er has throughout it all the feeling of the traveller who 
never finds time to unpack his portmanteau. On the re- 
enrolment of the regiment in 1714, " our household," says 
the narrative, "decamped from York with bag and bag- 
gage for Dublin. Within a month my father left us, be- 
ing ordered to Exeter ; where, in a sad winter, my mother 
and her two children followed him, travelling from Liver- 
pool, by land, to Plymouth." At Plymouth Mrs. Sterne 
gave birth to a son, christened Joram ; and, " in twelve 
months' time we were all sent back to Dublin. My moth- 
er," with her three children, " took ship at Bristol for Ire- 
land, and had a narrow escape from being cast away by a 
leak springing up in the vessel. At length, after many 
perils and struggles, we got to Dublin." Here intervenes 
the short breathing-space, of which mention has been made 
- — an interval employed by Roger Sterne in " spending a 
oreat deal of money " on a " large house," which he hired 
.".nd furnished; and then "in the year one thousand seven 
•"indred and nineteen, all unhinged again." The regiment 
ii.nl been ordered off to the Isle of Wight, thence to era- 
I).irk for Spain, on " the Vigo Expedition," and "we," who 
Mccompanied it, " were driven into Milford Haven, but af- 
tLM- wards landed at Bristol, and thence by land to Plymouth 
again, and to the Isle of Wight ;" losing on this expedi- 
tion " poor Joram, a pretty boy, who died of the small- 
pox." In the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Sterne and her family 
remained till the Vigo Expedition returned home ; and 
during her stay there " poor Joram's loss was supplied by 
the birth of a girl, Anne," a " pretty blossom," but destined 
to fall " at the age of three years." On the return of the 
regiment to Wicklow, Roger Sterne again sent to collect 
his family around him. " We embarked for Dublin, and 



6 STERNE. [chap. 

had all been cast away by a most violent storm ; but, 
through the intercession of my mother, the captain was 
prevailed upon to turn back into "Wales, where we stayed 
a month, and at length got into Dublin, and travelled by 
land to Wicklow, where my father had, for some weeks, 
given us over for lost." Here a 'year passed, and another 
child, Devijeher — so called after the colonel of the regi- 
ment — was born. *' From thence we decamped to stay 
half a year with Mr. Fetherston, a clergyman, about seven 
miles from Wicklow, who, being a relative of my mother's, 
invited us to his parsonage at Animo.^ From thence, 
again, *^ we followed the regiment to Dublin," where again 
"we lay in the barracks a year." In 1722 the regiment 
was ordered to Carrickfergus. *'We all decamped, but 
got no further than Drogheda ; thence ordered to Mullin- 
gar, forty miles west, where, by Providence, we stumbled 
upon a kind relation, a collateral descendant from Arch- 
bishop Sterne, who took us all to his castle, and kindly en- 
tertained us for a year." Thence, by " a most rueful jour- 
ney," to Carrickfergus, where " we arrived in six or seven 

^ " It was in this parish," says Sterne, *'that I had that wonderful 
escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was going, and 
being taken up unhurt ; the story is incredible, but known to all that 
part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people flocked to see 
me." More incredible still does it seem that Thoresby should relate 
the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind to Sterne's 
great-grandfather, the Archbishop. " Playing near a mill, he fell with- 
in a claw ; there was but one board or bucket wanting in the whole 
wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void place 
came down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death ; but 
was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.) 
But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even 
than this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware 
pf it, or should have omitted mention of it in the above passage. 



I.] BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 7 

days." Here, at the age of three, little Devijeher obtained 
a happy release from his name; and *' another child, Su- 
san, was sent to fill his place, who also left us behind in 
this weary journey." In the '* autumn of this year, or the 
spring of the next" — Sterne's memory failing in exacti- 
tude at the very point where we should have expected it 
to be most precise — "my father obtained permission of 
his colonel to fix me at school ;" and henceforth the boy's 
share in the family wanderings was at an end. But his 
father had yet to be ordered from Carrickfergus to Lon- 
donderry, where at last a permanent child, Catherine, was 
born ; and thence to Gibraltar, to take part in the Defence 
of that famous Rock, where the much-enduring campaigner 
was run through the body in a duel, '* about a goose" (a 
thoroughly Shandian catastrophe) ; and thence to Jamaica, 
where, " with a constitution impaired " by the sword-thrust 
earned in his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more 
deadly duel with the ''country fever," and died. "His 
malady," writes his son, with a touch of feeling struggling 
through his dislocated grammar, " took away his senses 
first, and made a child of him ; and then in a month or 
two walking about continually without complaining, till 
the moment he sat down in an arm-chair and breathed his 
last." 

There is, as has been observed, a certain mixture of the 
comic and the pathetic in the life-history of this obscure 
father of a famous son. His life was clearly not a fortu- 
nate one, so far as external circumstances go ; but its mis- 
fortunes had no sort of consoling dignity about them. 
Roger Sterne's lot in the world was not so much an un- 
happy as an uncomfortable one ; and discomfort earns lit- 
tle sympathy, and absolutely no admiration, for its suffer- 
ers. He somehow reminds us of one of those Irish heroes 



8 STERNE. [chap. 

— good-natured, peppery, debt-loaded, light-hearted, shift- 
less — whose fortunes we follow with mirthful and half- 
contemptuous sympathy in the pages of Thackeray. He 
was obviously a typical specimen of that class of men who 
are destitute alike of the virtues and failings of the "re- 
spectable" and successful; whom many people love and 
no one respects ; whom everybody pities in their struggles 
and difficulties, but w^hom few pity without a smile. 

It is evident, however, that he succeeded in winning the 
affection of one who had not too much affection of the 
deeper kind to spare for any one. The figure of Roger 
Sterne alone stands out with any clearness by the side of 
the ceaselessly flitting mother and phantasmal children of 
Laurence Sterne's Memoir; and it is touched in with strokes 
so vivid and characteristic that critics have been tempted 
to find in it the original of the most famous portrait in 
the Shandy gallery. " My father," says Sterne, " was a 
little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, 
most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it 
pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his 
temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet 
disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his own 
intentions, that he suspected no one ; so that you might 
have cheated him ten times a day, if nine had not been 
sufficient for your purpose." This is a captivating little 
picture; and it no doubt presents traits which may have 
impressed themselves early and deeply on the imagination 
which was afterwards to give birth to ** My Uncle Toby." 
The simplicity of nature and the " kindly, sweet disposi- 
tion" are common to both the ensign of real life and to 
the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction ; but the criticism 
which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne's " rapid and 
hasty temper" in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain 



I.] BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 9 

itself considerably. And, on the whole, there seems no 
reason to believe that Sterne borrowed more from the 
character of his father than any writer must necessarily, 
and perhaps unconsciously, borrow from his observation 
of the moral and mental qualities of those with whom he 
has come into most frequent contact. 

That Laurence Sterne passed the first eleven years of 
his life with such an exemplar of these simple virtues of 
kindliness, guilelessness, and courage ever before him, is 
perhaps the best that can be said for the lot in which his 
early days were cast. In almost all other respects there 
could hardly have been — for a quick-witted, precocious, 
imitative boy — a worse bringing-up. No one, I should 
imagine, ever more needed discipline in his youth than 
Sterne ; and the camp is a place of discipline for the sol- 
dier only. To all others whom necessity attaches to it, 
and to the young especially, it is rather a school of license 
and irregularity. It is fair to remember these disadvan- 
tages of Sterne's early training, in judging of the many 
defects as a man, and laxities as a writer, which marked his 
later life ; though, on the other hand, there is no denying 
the reality and value of some of the countervailing advan- 
tages which came to him from his boyish surroundings. 
The conception of my Uncle Toby need not have been 
taken whole from Roger Sterne, or from any one actual 
captain of a marching regiment ; but the constant sight 
of, and converse with, many captains and many corporals 
may undoubtedly have contributed much to the vigour and 
vitality of Toby Shandy and Corporal Trim. So far as 
the externals of portraiture were concerned, there can be 
no doubt that his art benefited much from his early mili- 
tary life. His soldiers have the true stamp of the soldier 

about them in air and language ; and when his captain and 
B 



10 STERNE. [chap. I. 

corporal fight their Flemish battles over again we are thor- 
oughly conscious that we are listening, under the dramatic 
form, to one who must himself have heard many a chapter 
of the same splendid story from the lips of the very men 
who had helped to break the pride of the Grand Monarque 
under Marlborough and Eugene. 



CHAPTER II. 

SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY. HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 

(1723-1738.) 

It vvas not — as we have seen from the Memoir— till the 
autumn of 1723, "or the spring of the following year," 
that Roger Sterne obtained leave of his colonel to *' fix " 
his son at school ; and this would bring Laurence to the 
tolerably advanced age of ten before beginning his edu- 
cation in any systematic way. He records, under date of 
1721, that *'in this year I learned to write, &c. ;" but it 
is not probable that the *' &c." — that indolent symbol of 
which Sterne makes such irritating use in all his familinr 
writing — covers, in -this case, any wide extent of educa- 
tional advance. The boy, most likely, could just read and 
write, and no more, at the time when he was fixed at 
school, ** near Halifax, with an able master :" a judicious 
selection, no doubt, both of place as well as teacher. Mr. 
Fitzgerald, to whose researches we owe as much light as 
is ever likely to be thrown upon this obscure and proba- 
bly not very interesting period of Sterne's life, has point- 
ed out that Richard Sterne, eldest son of the late Simon 
Sterne, and uncle, therefore, of Laurence, was one of the 
governors of Halifax Grammar School, and that he may 
have used his interest to obtain his nephew's admission to 
the foundation as the grandson of a Halifax man, and so, 
constructively, a child of the parish. But, be this as it 



12 STERNE. [chap. 

may, it is more than probable tliat from the time when 
he was sent to Halifax School the whole care and cost of 
the boy's education was borne by his Yorkshire relatives. 
The Memoir says that, "by God's care of me, my cousin 
Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to me, and sent me 
to the University, &c., &c. ;" and it is to be inferred from 
this that the benevolent guardianship of Sterne's uncle 
Richard (who died in 1732, the year before Laurence was 
admitted of Jesus College, Cambridge) must have been 
taken up by his son. Of his school course — though it 
lasted for over seven years — the autobiographer has little 
to say ; nothing, indeed, except that he " cannot omit men- 
tioning " that anecdote with which everybody, I suppose, 
who has ever come across the briefest notice, of Sterne's 
life is familiar. The schoolmaster " had the ceiling of 
the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remain- 
ed there. I, one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with 
a brush, in large capital letters, LAU. STERNE, for which 
the usher severely whipped me. My master was very 
much hurt at this, and said before me that never should 
that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he 
was sure I should come to preferment. This expression 
made me forget the blows I had received." It is hardly 
to be supposed, of course, that this story is pure romance; 
but it is difficult, on the other hand, to believe that the in- 
cident has been related by Sterne exactly as it happened. 
*That the recorded prediction may have been made in jest 
— or even in earnest (for penetrating teachers have these 
prophetic moments sometimes) — is, of course, possible; 
but that Sterne's master was "very much hurt" at the 
boy's having been justly punished for an act of wanton 
mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege 
of nascent genius to deface newly - whitewashed ceilings, 



II.] HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 13 

must have been a delusion of the humourist's later years. 
The extreme fatuity which it would compel us to attribute 
to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent with the power of 
detecting intellectual capacity in any one els<3. On the 
whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to 
that order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain 
sort of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consola- 
tion of a recently-caned boy ; and that Sterne's vanity, 
either then or afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his 
life), translated it into a serious prophecy. In itself, how- 
ever, the urchin's freak was only too unhappily character- 
istic of the man. The trick of befoulino- what was clean 
(and because it was clean) clung to him most tenaciously 
all his days ; and many a fair white surface — of humour, 
of fancy, or of sentiment — was to be disfigured by him 
in after-years with stains and splotches in which we can 
all too plainly decipher the literary signature of Laurence 
Sterne. 

At Halifax School the boy, as has been said, remained 
for about eight years; that is, until he was nearly nineteen, 
and for some months after his father's death at Port An- 
tonio, which occurred in March, 1731. "In the year '32," 
says the Memoir, "my cousin sent me to the University, 
where I stayed some time." In the course of his first year 
he read for and obtained a sizarship, to which the college 
records show that he was duly admitted on the 6th of July, 
1733. The selection of Jesus College was a natural one: 
Sterne's great-grandfather, the afterwards Archbishop, had 
been its Master, and had founded scholarships there, to one 
of which the young sizar was, a year after his admission, 
elected. No inference can, of course, be drawn from this 
as to Sterne's proficiency, or even industry, in his academ- 
ical studies : it is scarcely more than a testimony to the 



U STERNE. [chap. 

fact of decent and regular behaviour. He was bene natus, 
in the sense of being related to the right man, the founder ; 
and in those days he need be only very modice doctus in- 
deed in order to qualify himself for admission to the en- 
joyment of his kinsman's benefactions. Still he must have 
been orderly and well-conducted in his ways ; and this he 
would also seem to have been, from the fact of his having 
passed through his University course without any apparent 
break or hitch, and having been admitted to his Bachelor's 
degree after no more than the normal period of residence. 
The only remark vt'hich, in the Memoir, he vouchsafes to 
bestow npon his academical career is, that ** 'twas there 

that I commenced a friendship with Mr. H , which has 

been lasting on both sides ;" and it may, perhaps, be said 
that this was^ from one point of view, the most important 

event of his Cambridge life. For Mr. H was John 

Hall, afterwards John Hall Stevenson, the " Eugenius " of 
Tristram Shandy, the master of Skelton Castle, at which 
Sterne was, throughout life, to be a frequent and most 
familiar visitor ; and, unfortunately, also a person whose 
later reputation, both as a man and a writer, became such 
as seriously to compromise the not very robust respectabil- 
ity of his clerical comrade. Sterne and Hall were distant 
cousins, and it, may have been the tie of consanguinity 
which first drew them together. But there was evidently 
a thorough congeniality of the most unlucky sort between 
them ; and from their first meeting, as undergraduates at 
Jesus, until the premature death of the elder, they contin- 
ued to supply each other's minds with precisely that sort 
of occupation and stimulus of which each by the grace of 
nature stood least in need. That their close intimacy was 
ill-calculated to raise Sterne's reputation in later years may 
be inferred from the fact that Hall Stevenson afterwards 



II.] HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 15 

obtained literary notoriety by the publication of Craz^ 
Tales, Si collection of coraic but extremely broad ballads, 
in which his clerical friend was quite unjustly suspected of 
having had a hand. Mr. Hall was also reported, whether 
truly or falsely, to have been a naeraber of Wilkes's famous 
confraternity of Medmenham Abbey ; and from this it was 
an easy step for gossip to advance to the assertion that the 
Rev. Mr. Sterne had himself been admitted to that unholy 
order. 

Among acquaintances which the young sizar of Jesus 
might have more profitably made at Cambridge, but did 
not, was that of a student destined, like himself, to leave 
behind him a name famous in English letters. Gray, born 
three years later than Sterne, had entered a year after him 
at Cambridge as a pensioner of Peterhouse, and the two 
students went through their terms together, though the 
poet at the time took no degree. There was probably lit- 
tle enough in common between the shy, fastidious, slightly 
effeminate pensioner of Peterhouse, and a scholar of Jesus, 
whose chief friend and comrade was a man like Hall; and 
no close intimacy between the two men, if they had come 
across each other, would have been very likely to arise. 
But it does not appear that they could have ever met or 
heard of each other, for Gray writes of Sterne, after Tris- 
tram Shandy had made him famous, in terms which clear- 
ly show that he did not recall his fellow-undergraduate. 

In January, 1736, Sterne took his B.A. degree, and quit- 
ted Cambridge for York, where another of his father's 
brothers now makes his appearance as his patron. Dr. 
Jacques Sterne was the second son of Simon Sterne, of 
Elvingtou, and a man apparently of more marked and vig- 
orous character than any of his brothers. What induced 
him now to take notice of the nephew, whom in boyhood 



16 STERNE. • [chap. 

and early youth he had left to the unshared guardianship 
of his brother, and brother's son, does not appear; but the 
personal history of this energetic pluralist — Prebendary of 
Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, Canon Residentiary, 
Precentor, Prebendary, and Archdeacon of York, Rector of 
Rise, and Rector of Hornsey-cura-Rislon — suggests the sur- 
mise that he detected qualities in the young Cambridge 
graduate which would make him useful. For Dr. Sterne 
was a typical specimen of the Churchman -politician, in 
days when both components of the compound word 
meant a good deal more than they do now. The Arch- 
deacon was a devoted Whig, a Hanoverian to the back- 
bone; and he held it his duty to support the Protestant 
succession, not only by the spiritual but by the secular arm. 
He was a great electioneerer, as befitted times when the 
claims of two rival dynasties virtually met upon the hust- 
ings, and he took a prominent part in the great Yorkshire 
contest of the year 1734. His most vigorous display of 
energy, however, was made, as was natural, in " the '45." 
The Whig Archdeacon, not then Archdeacon of the East 
Riding, nor as yet quite buried under the mass of prefer- 
ments which he afterwards accumulated, seems to have 
thought that this indeed was the crisis of his fortunes, and 
that, unless he was prepared to die a mere prebendary, 
canon, and rector of one or two benefices, now was the 
time to strike a blow for his advancement in the Church. 
His bustling activity at this trying time was indeed por- 
tentous, and at last took the form of arresting the unfort- 
unate Dr. Burton (the original of Dr. Slop), on suspicion 
of holding communication with the invading army of the 
Pretender, then on its march southward from Edinburgh. 
The suspect, who was wholly innocent, was taken to Lon- 
don and kept in custody for nearly a year before being 



II.] HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 17 

discharged, after which, by way of a slight redress, a letter 
of reprimand for his trap de zele was sent by direction of 
Lord Carteret to the militant dignitary. But the desired 
end was nevertheless attained, and Dr. Sterne succeeded in 
crownino- the edifice of his ecclesiastical honours.^ 

There can be little doubt that patronage extended by 
such an uncle to such a nephew received its full equiva- 
lent in some way or other, and indeed the Memoir gives 
us a clue to the mode in which payment was made. " My 
uncle," writes Sterne, describing their subsequent rupture, 
" quarrelled -with me because I would not write paragraphs 
in the newspapers ; though he was a party-man, I was not, 
and detested such dirty work, thinking it beneath me. 
From that time he became my bitterest enemj." The 
date of this quarrel cannot be precisely fixed ; but we 
gather from an autograph letter (now in the British Mu- 
seum) from Sterne to Archdeacon Blackburne that by the 
year 1Y50 the two men had for some time ceased to be on 
friendly terms. Probably, however, the breach occurred 
subsequently to the rebellion of '45, and it may be that it 
arose out of the excess of partisan zeal which Dr. Sterne 
developed in that year, and which his nephew very likely 

^ A once-familiar piece of humorous verse describes the upset of 
a coach containing a clerical pluralist : 

" When struggling on the ground was seen 
A Rector, Vicar, Canon, Dean ; 
You might have thought the coach was full, 
But no ! 'twas only Dr. Bull." 

Dr. Jacques Sterne, however, might have been thrown out of one of 
the more capacious vehicles of the London General Omnibus Com- 
pany, with almost the same misleading effect upon those who only 
heard of the mishap. 
2 



18 STERNE. [CHAP. 

did not, in his opinion, sufficiently share. But this is 
quite consistent with the younger man's having up to that 
time assisted the elder in his party polemics. He certainly 
speaks in his ^* Letters" of his having " employed his brains 
for an ungrateful person," and the remark is made in a 
way and in a connexion which seems to imply that the 
services rendered to his uncle were mainly literary. If so, 
his declaration that he "would not write paragraphs in the 
newspapers" can only mean that he would not go on writ- 
ing them. Be this as it may, how^ever, it is certain that 
the Archdeacon for some time found his account in main- 
taining friendly relations with his nephew, and that during 
that period he undoubtedly did a good deal for his ad- 
vancement. Sterne was ordained deacon by the Bishop of 
Lincoln in March, 1736, only three months after taking his 
B. A. degree, and took priest's orders in August, 1738, where- 
upon his uncle immediately obtained for him the living of 
Sutton-on-the-Forest, into which he was inducted a few 
days afterwards. Other preferments followed, to be noted 
hereafter; and it must be admitted that until the quarrel 
occurred about the "party paragraphs" the Archdeacon 
did his duty by his nephew after the peculiar fashion of 
that time. When that quarrel came, however, it seems to 
have snapped more ties than one, for in the Memoir Sterne 
speaks of his youngest sister Catherine as " still living, but 
most unhappily estranged from me by my uncle's wicked- 
ness and her own folly." Of his elder sister Mary, who 
was born at Lille a year before himself, he records that 
" she married one Weemans in Dublin, who used her most 
unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and 
left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able 
to do but for a few months, for she went to a friend's 
house in the country and died of a broken heart." Truly 



II.] HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 19 

an unlucky family/ Only three to survive the hardships 
among which the years of their infancy were passed, and 
this to be the history of two out of the three survivors ! 

* The mother, Mrs. Sterne, makes her appearance once more for a 
moment in or about the year 1758. Horace Walpole, and after him 
Byron, accused Sterne of having " preferred whining over a dead ass 
to relieving a living mother," and the former went so far as to de- 
clare " on indubitable authority" that Mrs. Sterne, " who kept a school 
(in Ireland), having run in debt on account of an extravagant daugh- 
ter, would have rotted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not 
raised a subscription for her." Even " the indubitable authority," 
however, does not positively assert — whatever may be meant to be 
insinuated — that Sterne himself did nothing to assist his mother, 
and Mr. Fitzgerald justly points out that to pay the whole debts of 
a bankrupt school might well have been beyond a Yorkshire clergy- 
man's means. Anyhow there is evidence that Sterne at a later date 
than this was actively concerning himself about his mother's inter- 
ests. She afterwards came to York, whither he went to meet her; 
and he then writes to a friend : *' I trust my poor mother's affair is 
by this time ended to owr comfort and hers." 



CHAPTER HI. 

LIFE AT SUTTON. MARRIAGE. THE PARISH PRIEST. 

(1738-1759.) 

Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscu- 
rity into fame and yet die early, must always form more or 
less perplexing subjects of literary biography. The proc- 
esses of their intellectual and artistic growth lie hidden in 
nameless years ; their genius is not revealed to the world 
until it has reached its full maturity, and many aspects of 
it, which, perhaps, would have easily explained themselves 
if the gradual development had gone on before men's eyes, 
remain often unexplained to the last. By few, if any, of 
the more celebrated English men of letters is this observa- 
tion so forcibly illustrated as it is in the case of Sterne : the 
obscure period of his life so greatly exceeded in duration 
the brief season of his fame, and its obscurity was so ex- 
ceptionally profound. He was forty - seven years of age 
when, at a bound, he achieved celebrity ; he was not five- 
and-fifty when he died. And though it might be too much 
to say that the artist sprang, like the reputation, full-grown 
into being, it is nev^ertheless true that there are no marks 
of positive immaturity to be detected even in the earliest 
public displays of his art. His work grows, indeed, most 
marvellously in vividness and symmetry as he proceeds, but 
there are no visible signs of growth in the workman's skill. 



CHAP. III.] LIFE AT SUTTON. 21 

Even when the higliest point of finish is attained we can- 
not say that the hand is any more cunning than it was 
from the first. As well might we say that the last light 
touches of the sculptor's chisel upon the perfected statue 
are more skilful than its first vigorous strokes upon the 
shapeless block. 

It is certain, however, that Sterne must have been storing 
up his material of observation, secreting his reflections on 
life and character, and consciously or unconsciously matur- 
ing his poAvers of expression, during the whole of those si- 
lent twenty years which have now to be passed under brief 
review. With one exception, to be noted presently, the 
only known writings of his which belong to this period 
are sermons, and these — a mere "scratch" collection of 
pulpit discourses, which, as soon as he had gained the pub- 
lic ear, he hastened in characteristic fashion to rummage 
from his desk and carry to the book-market — throw no 
light upon the problem before us. There are sermons of 
Sterne which alike in manner and matter disclose the au- 
thor of Tristram Shandy ; but they are not among those 
which he preached or wrote before that work was given to 
the world. They are not its ancestors but its descendants. 
They belong to the post-Shandian period, and are in obvi- 
ous imitation of the Shandian style ; while in none of the 
earlier ones — not even in that famous homily on a Good 
Conscience, which did not succeed till Corporal Trim 
preached it before the brothers Shandy and Dr.- Slop — 
can we trace either the trick of style or the turn of thought 
that give piquancy to the novel. Yet the peculiar quali- 
ties of mind, and the special faculty of workmanship of 
which this turn of thought and trick of style were the 
product, must of course have been potentially present from 
the beginning. Men do not blossom forth as wits, hu- 



22 STERNE. [chap. 

mourists, masterly delineators of character, and skilful per- 
formers on a highly-strung and carefully-tuned sentimental 
instrument all at once, after entering their *' forties ;" and 
the only wonder is that a possessor of these powers — some 
of them of the kind which, as a rule, and in most men, 
seeks almost as irresistibly for exercise as even the poetic 
instinct itself — should have been held so long unemployed. 
There is, however, one very common stimulus to literary 
exertions which in Sterne's case was undoubtedly wanting 
— a superabundance of unoccupied time. We have little 
reason, it is true, to suppose that this light-minded and 
valetudinarian Yorkshire parson was at any period of his 
life an industrious "parish priest;" but it is probable, 
nevertheless, that time never hung very heavily upon his 
hands. In addition to the favourite amusements which he 
enumerates in the Memoir, he was all his days addicted to 
one which is, perhaps, the most absorbing of all — flirtation. 
Philandering, and especially philandering of the Platonic 
and ultra-sentimental order, is almost the one human pas- 
time of which its votaries never seem to tire ; and its con- 
stant ministrations to human vanity may serve, perhaps, 
to account for their unwearied absorption in its pursuit. 
Sterne's first love affair — an affair of which, unfortunately, 
the consequences were more lasting than the passion — took 
place immediately upon his leaving Cambridge. To relate 
it as he relates it to his daughter : " At York I became ac- 
quainted with your mother, and courted her for two years. 
She owned she liked me, but thought herself not rich 
enough or me too poor to be joined together. She went 
to her sister's in S[taffordshire], and I wrote to her often. 
I believe then she was partly determined to have me, but 
would not say so. At her return she fell into a con- 
sumption, and one evening that I was sitting by her, with 



III.] MARRIAGE. 23 

an almost broken heart to see her so ill, she said: ^ My 
dear Laury, I never can be yours, for I verily believe I 
have not long to live! but I have left you every shil- 
ling of my fortune.' Upon that she showed me her will. 
This generosity overpowered me. It pleased God that 
she recovered, and we were married in 1741." The 
name of this lady was Elizabeth Lumley, and it was to 
her that Sterne addressed those earliest letters which 
his daughter included in the collection published by her 
some eight years after her father's death. They were 
added, the preface tells us, *' in justice to Mr. Sterne's 
delicate feelings ;" and in our modern usage of the word 
" delicate," as equivalent to infirm of health and probably 
short of life, they no doubt do full justice to the passion 
which they are supposed to express. It would be unfair, 
of course, to judge any love-letters of that penod by the 
standard of sincerity applied in our own less artificial age. 
All such compositions seem frigid and formal enough to 
us of to-day ; yet in most cases of genuine attachment we 
usually find at least a sentence here and there in which the 
natural accents of the heart make themselves heard above 
the affected modulations of the style. But the letters of 
Sterne's courtship maintain the pseudo- poetic, shepherd- 
and-shepherdess strain throughout ; or, if the lover ever 
abandons it, it is only to make somewhat maudlin record 
of those '' tears " which flowed a little too easily at all 
times throughout his life. These letters, however, have a 
certain critical interest in their bearing upon those sensi- 
bilities which Sterne after w^ards learned to cultivate in a 
forcing-frame, with a view to the application of their prod- 
uce to the purposes of an art of pathetic writing which 
simulates nature with such admirable fidelity at its best, 
and descends to such singular bathos at its worst. 



24 STERNE. [chap. 

The marriage preluded by this courtship did not take 
place till Sterne had already been three years Vicar of Sut- 
ton-on-the-Forest, the benefice which had been procured 
for him by his uncle the Archdeacon ; through whose in- 
terest also he was appointed successively to two prebends 
— preferments which were less valuable to him for their 
emolument than for the ecclesiastical status which they 
conferred upon him, for the excuse which they gave him 
for periodical visits to the cathedral city to fulfil the resi- 
dential conditions of his oflBces, and for the opportunity 
thus afforded him of mixing in and studying the society 
of the Close. Upon his union with Miss Lumley, and, in 
a somewhat curious fashion, by her means, he obtained in 
addition the living of Stillington. *'A friend of hers in 
the South had promised her that if she married a clergy- 
man in Yorkshire, when the living became vacant he would 
make her a compliment of it ;" and made accordingly this 
singular ** compliment" was. At Sutton Sterne remained 
nearly twenty years, doing duty at both places, during 
which time " books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were," 
he says, " my chief amusements." With what success he 
shot, and with what skill he fiddled, we know not. His 
writings contain not a few musical metaphors and allu- 
sions to music, which seem to indicate a competent ac- 
quaintance with its technicalities ; but the specimen of 
his powers as an artist, which Mr. Fitzgerald has repro- 
duced from his illustrations of a volume of poems by Mr. 
Woodhull, does not dispose one to rate highly his pro- 
ficiency in this accomplishment. We may expect that, 
after all, it was the first-mentioned of his amusements in 
which he took the greatest delight, and that neither the 
brush, the bow, nor the fowling-piece was nearly so often 
in his hand as the book. Within a few miles of Sutton, 



III.] MARRIAGE. 25 

at SkeltoQ Castle, an almost unique Eonian stronghold, 
since modernized by Gothic hands, dwelt his college-friend 
John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library contained 
a choice but heteroo-eneous collection of books — old French 
*' ana," and the learning of mediaeval doctors — books in- 
tentionally and books unintentionally comic, the former of 
which Sterne read with an only too retentive a u)emory for 
their jests, and the latter with an acutely humorous appre- 
ciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it will be time to 
note the extent to which he utilized these results of his 
widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of 
the mode in which he used them : here it is enough to 
say generally that the materials for many a burlesque chap- 
ter of Tristram Shandy must have been unconsciously 
storing themselves in his mind in many an amused hour 
passed by Sterne in the library of Skelton Castle. 

But before finally quitting this part of my subject it 
may be as well, perhaps, to deal somewhat at length with a 
matter which will doubtless have to be many times inci- 
dentally referred to in the course of this study, but which 
I now hope to relieve myself from the necessity of doing 
more than touch upon hereafter. I refer of course to 
Sterne's perpetually recurring flirtations. This is a mat- 
ter almost as impossible to omit from any biography of 
Sterne as it would be to omit it from any biography of 
Goethe. The English humourist did not, it is true, engage 
in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific, spirit of 
the German philosopher-poet ; it was not deliberately made 
by the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic 
development; but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt 
that Sterne's philandering propensities did exercise an in- 
fluence upon his literary character and work in more ways 
than one. That his mai'riage was an ill-assorted and un' 
C 2* 



26 STERNE. [chap. 

happy union was hardly so much the cause of his incon- 
stancy as its effect. It may well be, of course, that the 
*^ dear L.," whose moral and mental graces her lover had 
celebrated in such superfine, sentimental fashion, was a 
commonplace person enough. That she was really a wom- 
an of the exquisite stolidity of Mrs. Shandy, and that her 
exasperating feats as an assentatrix did, as has been sug- 
gested, supply the model for the irresistibly ludicrous col- 
loquies between the philosopher and his wife, there is no 
sufficient warrant for believing. But it is quite possible 
that the daily companion of one of the most indefatigable 
jesters that ever lived may have been unable to see a joke ; 
that she regarded her husband's wilder drolleries as mere 
horse-collar grimacing, and that the point of his subtler 
humour escaped her altogether. But even if it were so, it 
is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered 
at all on this ground from the wounded feelings of the 
mari incompris, while it is next to certain that it does not 
need the sting of any such disappointment to account for 
his alienation. He must have had plenty of time and op- 
portunity to discover Miss Lumley's intellectual limitations 
during the two years of his courtship ; and it is not likely 
that, even if they were as well marked as Mrs. Shandy's 
own, they would have done much of themselves to estrange 
the couple. Sympathy is not the necessity to the humour- 
ist which the poet finds, or imagines, it to be to himself : 
the humourist, indeed, will sometimes contrive to extract 
from the very absence of sympathy in those about hira a 
keener relish for his reflections. With sentiment, indeed, 
and still more with sentimentalism, the case would of course 
be different ; but as for Mr. Sterne's demands for sympa- 
thy in that department of his life and art, one may say 
without the least hesitation that they would have been be- 



in.] MARRIAGE. 27 

yond the power of any one woman, however distinguished 
a disciple of the *' Laura Matilda '' school, to satisfy. " I 
must ever," he frankly says in one of the " Yorick to Eliza" 
letters, " I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head : it 
harmonizes the soul ;" and he might have added that he 
found it impossible to sustain the harmony without fre- 
quently changing the Dulcinea. One may suspect that 
Mrs. Sterne soon had cause for jealousy, and it is at least 
certain that several years before Sterne's emergence into 
notoriety their estrangement was complete. One daughter 
was born to them in 1745, but lived scarcely more than 
long enough to be rescued from the liynhus infantium by 
the prompt rites of the Church. The child was christened 
Lydia, and died on the following day. Its place was tilled 
in 1747 by a second daughter, also christened Lydia, who 
lived to become the wife of M. de Medalle, and the not 
very judicious editress of the posthumous "Letters." For 
her as she grew up Sterne conceived a genuine and truly 
fatherly affection, and it is in writing to her and of her 
that we see him at his best ; or rather one might say it is 
almost only then that we can distinguish the true notes of 
the heart through that habitual falsetto of sentimcntalism 
which distinguishes most of Sterne's communications with 
the other sex. There was no subsequent issue of the mar- 
riage, and, from one of the letters most indiscreetly in- 
cluded in Madame de Medalle's collection, it is to be as- 
certained that some four years or so after Lydia's birth the 
relations between Sterne and Mrs. Sterne ceased to be con- 
jugal, and never again resumed that character. 

It is, however, probable, upon the husband's own con- 
fessions, that he had given his wife earlier cause for jeal- 
ousy, and certainly from the time when he begins to re- 
veal himself in correspondence there seems to be hardly 



28 STERNE. [chap. 

a moment when some such cause was not in existence 
— in the person of this, that, or the other lackadaisical 
damsel or coquettish matron. From Miss Fuurmantelle, 
the " dear, dear Kitty," to whom Sterne was making vio- 
lent love in 1759, the year of the York publication of 
Tristram Shandy, down to Mrs. Draper, the heroine of 
the famous " Yorick to Eliza " letters, the list of ladies 
who seem to have kindled flames in that susceptible breast 
is almost as long and more real than the roll of mistresses 
immortalized by Horace. How Mrs. Sterne at first bore 
herself under her husband's ostentatious neglect there is 
no direct evidence to show. That she ultimately took 
refuge in indifference we can perceive, but it is to be fear- 
ed that she was not always able to maintain the attitude 
of contemptuous composure. So, at least, we may suspect 
from the evidence of that Frenchman who met " le bon et 
agreable Tristram," and his wife, at Montpellier, and who, 
characteristically sympathizing with the inconstant hus- 
band, declared that his wife's incessant pursuit of him 
made him pass "d'assez mauvais moments," which he bore 
" with the patience of an angel." But, on the whole, Mrs. 
Sterne's conduct seems by her husband's own admissions 
to have been not wanting in dignity. 

As to the nature of Sterne's love-affairs I have come, 
though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they 
were most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat 
absurdly, Platonic. In saying this, however, I am by no 
means prepared to assert that they would all of them have 
passed muster before a prosaic and unsentimental British 
jury as mere indiscretions, and nothing worse. Sterne's 
relations with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assumed at 
last a profoundly compromising character, and it is far 
from improbable that the worst construction would have 



III.] MARRIAGE- 29 

been put upon them by one of the plain-dealino; tribunals 
aforesaid. Certainly a yonng woman who leaves her 
mother at York, and comes np to London to reside alone 
in lodgings, where she is constantly being visited by a 
lover who is himself living en gar^on in the metropolis, 
can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to her rep- 
utation ; neither can he if his own suffers in the same 
way. But, as I am not of those who hold that the con- 
ventionally "innocent" is the equivalent of the morally 
harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as 
worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that 
the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit con- 
tinually languishing at the feet of some other woman, 
gives much less pain and scandal to others,.or does much 
less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration, 
than the thorough -going profligate ; and I even feel tempt- 
ed to risk the apparent paradox that, from the artistic 
point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the gener- 
ally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the 
restraint of one instinct of his nature implied the over-in- 
dulgence of another which stood in at least as much need 
of chastenment. If his love-affairs stopped short of the 
gratification of the senses, they involved a perpetual fond- 
ling and caressing of those effeminate sensibilities of his 
into that condition of hyper-sesthesia which, though Sterne 
regarded it as the strength, was in reality the weakness, of 
his art. 

Injurious, however, as was the effect which Sterne's phi- 
landerings exercised upon his personal and literary charac- 
ter, it is not likely that, at least at this period of his life 
at Sutton, they had in any degree compromised his repu- 
tation. For this he had provided in other ways, and prin- 
cipally by his exceedingly injudicious choice of associates. 



so STERNE. [chap. 

" As to the squire of the parish," he remarks in the Me- 
moir, ** I cannot say we were on a very friendly footing, 
but at Still ington the family of the C[roft]s showed us ev- 
ery kindness: 'twas most agreeable to be within a mile and 
a half of an amiable family who w^ere ever cordial friends;" 
and w^ho, it may be added, appear to have been Sterne's 
only reputable acquaintances. For the satisfaction of all 
other social needs he seems to have resorted to a compan- 
ionship which it was hardly possible for a clergyman to 
frequent without scandal — that, namely, of John Hall Ste- 
venson and the kindred spirits whom he delighted to col- 
lect around him at Skelton — familiarly known as "Crazy" 
Castle. The club of the " Demoniacs," of which Sterne 
makes mention in his letters, may have had nothing very 
diabolical about it except the name ; but, headed as it was 
by the suspected ex-comrade of Wilkes and his brother 
monks of Medmenham, and recruited by gay militaires 
like Colonels Hall and Lee, and "fast" parsons like the 
Rev. " Panty " Lascelles (mock godson of Pantagruel), it 
was certainly a society in which the Vicar of Sutton could 
not expect to enroll himself without offence. We may 
fairly suppose, therefore, that it was to his association with 
these somewhat too "jolly companions" that Sterne owed 
that disfavour among decorous country circles, of which 
he shows resentful consciousness in the earlier chapters of 
Tristram Shandy, 

But before we finally cross the line which separates the 
life of the obscure country parson from the life of the 
famous author, a word or two must be said of that piece 
of writing which was alluded to a few pages back as the 
only known exception to the generally " professional " char- 
acter of all Sterne's compositions of the pre-Shandian era. 
This was a piece in the allegoric-satirical style, which, 



III.] THE PARISH PRIEST. 31 

though not very remarkable in itself, may not improbably 
have helped to determine its author's thoughts in the 
direction of more elaborate literary effoits. In the year 
1758 a dispute had arisen between a certain Dr. Topham, 
an ecclesiastical lawyer in large local practice, and Dr. 
Fountayne, the then Dean of York. This dispute had 
originated in an attempt on the part of the learned ci- 
vilian, who appears to have been a pluralist of an excep- 
tionally insatiable order, to obtain the reversion of one of 
his numerous offices for his son, alleging a promise made 
to him on that behalf by the Archbishop*. This promise 
— which had, in fact, been given — was legally impossible of 
performance, and upon the failure of his attempt the dis- 
appointed Topham turned upon the Dean, and maintained 
that by him^ at any rate, he had been promised another 
place of the value of five guineas per annum, and appro- 
priately known as the *' Commissaryship of Pickering and 
Pocklington." This the Dean denied, and thereupon Dr. 
Topham fired off a pamphlet getting forth the circum- 
stances of the alleged promise, and protesting against the 
wrong inflicted upon him by its non-performance. At 
this point Sterne came to Dr. Fountayne's assistance with 
a sarcastic apologue entitled the '' History of a good Warm 
Watchcoat," which had " hung up many years in the 
parish vestry," and showing how this garment had so 
excited the cupidity of Trim, the sexton, that " nothing 
would serve him but he must take it home, to have it 
converted into a warm under-petticoat for his wife and a 
jerkin for himself against the winter." The symbolization 
of Dr. Topham's snug ^* patent place," which he wished to 
make hereditary, under the image of the good warm watch- 
coat, is 'of course plain enough ; and there is some humour 
in the way in which the parson (the Archbishop) discovers 



32 STERNE. [chap. iii. 

that his incautious assent to Trim's request had been given 
ultra vires. Looking through the parish register, at the 
request of a labourer who wished to ascertain his age, the 
parson finds express words of bequest leaving the watch- 
coat " for the sole use of the sextons of the church for 
ever, to be worn by them respectively on winterly cold 
nights," and at the moment when he is exclaiming, ** Just 
Heaven ! what an escape have I had ! Give this for a 
petticoat to Trim's wife !" he is interrupted by Trim him- 
self entering the vestry with "the coat actually ript and 
cut out" ready for conversion into a petticoat for his wife. 
And we get a foretaste of the familiar Shandian imperti- 
nence in the remark which follows, that " there are many 
good similes subsisting in the world, but which I have 
neither time to recollect nor look for, which would give 
you an idea of the parson's astonishment at Trim's im- 
pudence." The emoluments of " Pickering and Pock- 
lington " appear under the figure of a " pair of black velvet 
phish breeches" which ultimately " got into the possession 
of one Lorry Slim (Sterne himself, of course), an unlucky 
wight, by whom they are still worn : in truth, as you will 
guess, they are very thin by this time." 

The whole thing is the very slightest of " skits ;" and 
the quarrel having been accommodated before it could be 
published, it was not given to the world until after its 
author's death. But it is interesting, as his first known 
attempt in this line of composition, and the grasping sex- 
ton deserves remembrance, if only as having handed down 
his name to a far more famous descendant. 



CHAPTER IV. 

" TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND II. 

(1759-1760.) 

Hitherto we have had to construct onr conception of 
Sterne out of materials of more or less plausible conjecture. 
We are now at last approaching the region of positive evi- 
dence, and henceforward, down almost to the last scene of 
all, Sterne's doings will be chronicled, and his character re- 
vealed, by one who happens, in this case, to be the best of 
all possible biographers — the man himself. Not that such 
records are by any means always the most trustw^orthy of 
evidence. There are some men whose real character is 
never more effectually concealed than in their correspond- 
ence. But it is not so with Sterne. The careless, slipshod 
letters which Madame de Medalle " pitchforked " into the 
book -market, rather than edited, are highly valuable as 
pieces of autobiography. They are easy, naive, and nat- 
ural, rich in simple self-disclosure in almost every page; 
and if thev have more to tell us about the man than 
the writer, they are yet not wanting in instructive hints 
as to Sterne's methods of composition and his theories 
of art. 

It was in the year 1759 that the Vicar of Sutton and 
Prebendary of York — already, no doubt, a stone of stum- 
bling and a rock of offence to many worthy people in the 



34 STERNE. [chap. 

county — conceived the idea of astonishing and scandalizing 
them still further after a new and original fashion. His 
impulses to literary production were probably various, and 
not all of them, or perhaps the strongest of them, of the 
artistic order. The first and most urgent was, it may be 
suspected, the simplest and most common of all such mo- 
tive forces. Sterne, in all likelihood, was in want of money. 
He was not, perhaps, under the actual instruction of that 
magister artium whom the Roman satirist has celebrated ; 
for he declared, indeed, afterwards, that " he wrote not to 
be fed, but to be famous." But the context of the passage 
shows that he only meant to deny any absolute compul- 
sion to write for mere subsistence. Between this sort of 
constraint and that gentler form of pressure which arises 
from the wish to increase an income sufficient for one's 
needs, but inadequate to one's desires, there is a consider- 
able difference ; and to repudiate the one is not to disclaim 
the other. It is, at any rate, certain that Sterne engaged 
at one time of his life in a rather speculative sort of farm- 
ing, and we have it from himself in a passage in one of his 
letters, which may be jest, but reads more like earnest, that 
it was his losses in this business that first turned his atten- 
tion to literature.^ His thoughts once set in that direction, 
his peculiar choice of subject and method of treatment are 
easily comprehensible. Pantagruelic burlesque came to 
him, if not naturally, at any rate by " second nature." 
He had a strong and sednlously cultivated taste for Rabe- 
laisian humour; his head was crammed with all sorts of 

^ " I was once such a puppy myself," he writes to a certain baronet 
whom he is attempting to discourage from speculative farming of 
this sort, " and had my labour for my pains and two hundred pounds 
out of pocket. Curse on farming! (I said). Let us see if the pen 
will not succeed better than the spade." 



lY.] "TRISTRAM SHANDY,'^ VOLS. I. AND 11. 35 

out-of-the-way learning constantly tickling his comic sense 
by its very uselessness ; he relished more keenly than any 
man the solemn futilities of mediaeval doctors, and the pe- 
dantic indecencies of casuist fathers ; and, along with all 
these temptations to an enterprise of the kind upon which 
he entered, he had been experiencing a steady relaxation 
of deterrent restraints. He had fallen out with his uncle 
some years since,^ and the quarrel had freed him from at 
least one influence making for clerical propriety of behav- 
iour. His incorrigible levities had probably lost him the 
countenance of most of his more serious acquaintances ; 
his satirical humour had as probably gained him personal 
enemies not a few, and it may be that he had gradually 
contracted something of that " naughty-boy " temper, as 
we may call it, for which the deliberate and ostentatious 
repetition of offences has an inexplicable charm. It seems 
clear, too, that, growth for growth with this spirit of brava- 
do, there bad sprung up — in somewhat incongruous com- 
panionship, perhaps — a certain sense of wrong. Along 
with the impulse to give an additional shock to the preju- 
dices he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vin- 
dicate what he considered the genuine moral worth under- 
lying the indiscretions of the offender. What, then, could 
better suit him than to compose a novel in which he might 
give full play to his simious humour, startle more hideously 
than ever his straighter-laced neighbours, defiantly defend 
his own character, and caricature whatever eccentric figure 

^ He himself, indeed, makes a particular point of this in explaining 
his literary venture. " Now for your desire," he writes to a corre- 
spondent in 1759, "of knowing the reason of my turning author? 
why, truly I am tired of employing my brains for other people's ad- 
vantage. 'Tis a foolish sacrifice I have made for some years for an 
ungrateful person." — Letters^ i. 82. 



36 STERN1E. [chap. 

in the society around him might offer the most tempting 
butt for ridicule ? 

All the world knows how far he ultimately advanced 
beyond the simplicity of the conception, and into what far 
higher regions of art its execution led him. But I find no 
convincing reason for believing that Tristram Shandy had 
at the outset any more seriously artistic purpose than this ; 
and much indirect evidence that this, in fact, it was. 

The humorous figure of Mr. Shandy is, of course, the 
Cervantic centre of the whole ; and it was out of him and 
his crotchets that Sterne, no doubt, intended from the first 
to draw the materials of that often unsavoury fun which 
was to amuse the light-minded and scandalize the demure. 
But it can hardly escape notice that the two most elab- 
orate portraits in Vol. I. — the admirable but very flatter- 
ingly idealized sketch of the author himself in Yorick, and 
the Gilrayesque caricature of Dr. Slop — are drawn with a 
distinctly polemical purpose, defensive in the former case 
and offensive in the latter. On the other hand, with the 
disappearance of Dr. Slop caricature of living persons dis- 
appears also ; while, after the famous description of Yor- 
ick's death-bed, we meet with no more attempts at self- 
vindication. It seems probable, therefore, that long before 
the first two volumes were completed Sterne had discovered 
the artistic possibilities of "My Upcle Toby" and "Cor- 
poral Trim," and had realized the full potentialities of hu- 
mour contained in the contrast between the two brothers 
Shandy. The very work of sharpening and deepening the 
outlines of this humorous antithesis, while it made the 
crack-brained philosopher more and more of a burlesque 
unreality, continually added new touches of life and nature 
to the lineaments of the simple-minded soldier ; and it was 
by this curious and half-accidental process that there came 



IV.] ^'TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND II. 37 

to be added to the gallery of English fiction one of the 
most perfect and delightful portraits that it possesses. 

We know from internal evidence that Tristram Shandy 
was begun in the early days of 1759; and the first two 
volumes were probably completed by about the middle of 
the year. "In the year 1760," writes Sterne, "I went up 
to London to publish my two first volumes of Shandy!''' 
And it is stated in a note to this passage, as cited in Scott's 
memoir, that the first edition was published " tlie year be- 
fore " in York. There is, however, no direct proof that it 
was in the hands of the public before the beginning of 
1760, though it is possible that the date of its publication 
may just have fallen within the year. But, at all events, 
on the 1st of January, 1760, an advertisement in the Pub- 
lic Advertiser informed the world that " this day " was 
"published, printed on superfine writing-paper, &c.. The 
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, York. Printed 
for and sold by John Hinxham, Bookseller in Stonegate." 
The great London publisher, Dodsley, to whom the book 
had been offered, and who had declined the venture, fig- 
ures in the advertisement as the principal London book- 
seller from whom it was to be obtained. It seems that 
only a few copies were in the first instance sent up to the 
London market ; but they fell into good hands, for there 
is evidence that Tristram Shandy had attracted the notice 
of at least one competent critic in the capital before the 
month of January was out. But though the metropolitan 
success of the book was destined to be delayed for still a 
month or two, in York it had already created ^furore in 
more senses than one. For, in fact, and no wonder, it had 
in many quarters given the deepest offence. Its Rabelai- 
sian license of incident and allusion was calculated to of- 
fend the proprieties — the provincial proprieties especially — 



38 STERNE. [chap. 

even in that free-spoken age ; and there was that in the 
book, moreover, which a provincial society may be count- 
ed on to abominate, with a keener if less disinterested ab- 
horrence than any sins against decency. It contained, or 
was supposed to contain, a broadly ludicrous caricature of 
one well-know^n local physician ; and an allusion, brief, in- 
deed, and covert, but highly scandalous, to a certain " droll 
foible" attributed to another personage of much wider 
celebrity in the scientific world. The victim in the latter 
case was no longer living ; and this circumstance brought 
upon Sterne a remonstrance from a correspondent, to 
which he replied in a letter so characteristic in many re- 
spects as to be worth quoting. His correspondent w^as a 
Dr. * * ^ ^ * (asterisks for which it is now impossible to 
substitute letters) ; and the burden of what seem to have 
been several communications in speech and writing on the 
subject was the maxim, " De mortuis nil nisi bonum." 
With such seriousness and severity had his correspondent 
dwelt upon this adage, that ** at length," writes Sterne, 
"you have made me as serious and as severe as yourself; 
but, that the humours you have stirred up might not work 
too potently within me, I have waited four days to cool 
myself before I could set pen to paper to answer you." 
And thus he sets forth the results of his four days' delib- 
eration : 

*''De mortuis nil nisi bonum.' I declare I have considered the 
wisdom and foundation of it over and over again as dispassionately 
and charitably as a good Christian can, and, after all, I can find noth- 
ing in it, or make more of it than a nonsensical lullaby of some 
nurse, put into Latin by some pedant, to be chanted by some hypo- 
crite to the end of the world for the consolation of departing lechers. 
'Tis, I own, Latin, and I think that is all the weight it has, for, in 
plain English, 'tis a loose and futile position below a dispute. * You 
are not to speak anything of the dead but what is good.' Why so? 



iv.] "TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND 11. 39 

Who says so ? Neither reason nor Scripture. Inspired authors iiave 
done otherwise, and reason and common sense tell me that, if the 
characters of past ages and men are to be drawn at all, they are to 
be drawn like themselves, that is, with their excellences and their 
foibles ; and it as much a piece of justice to the world, and to virtue, 
too, to do the one as the other. The ruling passion, et les ec/aremeids 
du coeu)\ are the very things which mark and distinguish a man's 
character, in which I would as soon leave out a man's head as his 
hobby-horse. However, if, like the poor devil of a painter, we must 
conform to the pious canon, ' De mortuis,' &c., which I own has a 
spice of piety in the sound of it, and be obliged to paint both our 
angels and our devils out of the same pot, I then infer that our Syd- 
enhams and our Sangrados, our Lucretias and our Messalinas, our 
Somersets and our Bolingbrokes, are alike entitled to statues, and 
all the historians or satirists who have said otherwise since they de- 
parted this life, from Sallust to S e, are guilty of the crimes 

you charge me with, ' cowardice and injustice.' But why cowardice ? 
*■ Because 'tis not courage to attack a dead man who can't defend 
himself.' But why do you doctors attack such a one with your in- 
cision knife? Oh ! for the good of the living. 'Tis my plea." 

And, having given this humorous twist to his argnment, 
he glides off into extenuatory matter. He had not even, 
he protests, made as much as a surgical incision into his 
victim (Dr. Richard Mead, the friend of Bentley and of 
Newton, and a physician and physiologist of high repute 
in his day) ; he had but jnst scratched him, and that 
scarce skin-deep. As to the ^' droll foible " of Dr. Mead, 
which he had made merry with, *'it was not first reported 
(even to the few who can understand the hint) by me, but 
known before by every chambermaid and footman within 
the bills of mortality " — a somewhat daring assertion, one 
would imagine, considering what the droll foible was ; and 
Dr. Mead, continues Sterne, great man as he was, had, 
after all, not fared worse than "' a man of twice his wis- 
dom" — to wit Solomon, of whom the same remark h^,d 



40 STERNE. [chap. 

been made, that " they were both great men, and, like all 
mortal men, had each their ruling passion." 

The mixture of banter and sound reasoning in this reply 
is, no doubt, very skilful. But, unfortunately, neither the 
reasoning nor the banter happens to meet the case of this 
particular defiance of the " De mortuis " maxim, and as a 
serious defence against a serious charge (which was what 
the occasion required) Sterne's answer is altogether futile. 
For the plea of " the good of the living," upon which, af- 
ter all, the whole defence, considered seriously, rests, was 
quite inapplicable as an excuse for the incriminated pas- 
sage. The only living persons who could possibly be af- 
fected by it, for good or evil, were those surviving friends 
of the dead man, to whom Sterne's allusion to what he 
called Dr. Mead's " droll foible " was calculated to cause 
the deepest pain and shame. 

The other matter of offence to Sterne's Yorkshire read- 
ers was of a much more elaborate kind. In the person of 
Dr. Slop, the grotesque man-midwife, who was to have as- 
sisted, but missed assisting, at Tristram's entry into the 
world, the good people of York were not slow to recog- 
nize the physical peculiarities and professional antecedents 
of Dr. Burton, the local accoucheur, whom Archdeacon 
Sterne had arrested as a Jacobite. That the portrait was 
faithful to anything but the external traits of the original, 
or was intended to reproduce anything more than these, 
Sterne afterwards denied ; and we have certainly no 
ground for thinking that Burton had invited ridicule on 
any other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the 
curious ugliness of his face and figure. It is most unlikely 
that his success as a practitioner in a branch of the med- 
ical art in which imposture is the most easily detected, 
could have been earned by mere quackery ; and he seems, 



IV.] "TRISTKAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND 11. 41 

moreover, to have been a man of learning in more kinds 
than one. The probability is that the worst that could 
be alleged against him was a tendency to scientific pedan- 
try in his published writings, which was pretty sure to 
tickle the fancy of Mr. Sterne. Unscrupulously, however, 
as he was caricatured, the sensation which appears to have 
been excited in the county by the burlesque portrait could 
hardly have been due to any strong public sympathy with 
the involuntary sitter. Dr. Burton seems, as a suspected 
Jacobite, to have been no special favourite with the York- 
shire squirearchy in general, but rather the reverse thereof. 
Ucalegon, however, does not need to be popular to arouse 
his neighbour's interest in his misfortunes; and the cari- 
cature of Burton was doubtless resented on the proximus 
ardet principle by many who feared that their turn was 
coming next. 

To all the complaints and protests which reached him 
on the subject Sterne would in any case, probably, have 
been indifferent ; but he was soon to receive encourage- 
ment which would have more than repaid a man of his 
temper for twice the number of rebukes. For London 
cared nothing for Yorkshire susceptibilities and Yorkshire 
fears. Provincial notables might be libelled, and their 
friends might go in fear of similar treatment, but all that 
was nothing to " the town," and Tristram Shandy had 
taken the town by storm. We gather from a passage in 
the letter above quoted that as early as January 30 the 
book had " gained the very favourable opinion " of Mr. 
Garrick, afterwards to become the author's intimate friend ; 
and it is certain that by the time of Sterne's arrival in 
London, in March, 1760, Tristram Shandy had become the 



rage. 



To say of this extraordinary work that it defies analysis 
D 3 



42 STERNE. [chap. 

would be the merest inadequacy of commonplace. It was 
meant to defy analysis ; it is of the very essence of its 
scheme and purpose that it should do so ; and the mere 
attempt to subject it systematically to any such process 
would argue an altogether mistaken conception of the 
author's intent. Its full " official " style and title is The 
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy^ Gent.^ and it 
is difficult to say which it contains the less about — the 
opinions of Tristram Shandy or the events of his life. As 
a matter of fact, its proper description would be " The 
Opinions of Tristram Shandy's Father, with some Passages 
from the Life of his Uncle." Its claim to be regarded as 
a biography of its nominal hero is best illustrated by the 
fact that Tristram is not born till the third volume, and 
not breeched till the sixth ; that it is not till the seventh 
that he begins to play any active part in the narrative, 
appearing then only as a completely colourless and unin- 
dividualized figure, a mere vehicle for the conveyance of 
Sterne's own Continental impressions de voyage ; and that 
in the last two volumes, which are entirely taken up with 
the incident of his uncle's courtship, he disappears from 
the story altogether. It is to be presumed, perhaps, though 
not very confidently, that the reader would have seen more 
of him if the tale had been continued ; but how much or 
how little is quite uncertain. The real hero of the book 
is at the outset Mr. Shandy, senior, who is, later on, suc- 
ceeded in this place of dignity by my Uncle Toby. It not 
only served Sterne's purpose to confine himself mainly to 
these two characters, as the best whereon to display his 
powers, but it was part of his studied eccentricity to do 
so. It was a " point " to give as little as possible about 
Tristram Shandy in a life of Tristram Shandy ; just as it 
was a point to keep the reader waiting throughout the year 



IT.] " TKISTRAM SHAXDY," VOLS. I. AXD II. 43 

1760 for their hero to be so much as born. In the first 
vohime, therefore, the author does literally everything but 
make the slightest progress with his story. Starting off 
abruptly with a mock physiologic disquisition upon the 
importance of a proper ordering of their mental states on 
the part of the intending progenitors of children, he phi- 
losophizes gravely on this theme for two or^three chapters; 
and then wanders awav into an account of the local mid- 
wife, upon whose sole services Mrs. Shandy, in opposition 
to her husband, was inclined to rely. From the midwife 
it is an easy transition to her patron and protector, the 
incumbent of the parish, and this, in its turn, suggests a 
long excursus on the character, habits, appearance, home, 
friends, enemies, and finally death, burial, and epitaph of 
the Rev. Mr. Yorick. Thence we return to Mr. and Mrs. 
Shandy, and are made acquainted, in absurdly minute 
detail, with an agreement entered into between them with 
reference to the place of sojourn to be selected for the 
lady's accouchement, the burlesque deed which records 
this compact being actually set out at full length. Thence, 
again, we are beckoned away by the jester to join him in 
elaborate and not very edifying ridicule of the Catholic 
doctrine of ante-natal baptism ; and thence — but it would 
be useless to follow further the windings and doublings of 
this literary hare. 

Yet though the book, as one thus summarizes it, may 
appear a mere farrago of digressions, it nevertheless, after 
its peculiar fashion, advances. Such definite purpose as 
underlies the tricks and grimaces of its author is by de- 
grees accomplished ; and before we reach the end of the 
first volume the highly humorous, if extravagantly ideal- 
ized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consist- 
ency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Wal- 



44 STERNE. [chap. 

ter Scott's to regard the portrait of this eccentric philoso- 
pher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged 
erudition — as the study of a man *' whom too much and 
too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or 
two of madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a 
little more subtle and less commonplace than that. Mr. 
Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not *' crack- 
brained learning " so much as *' theory run mad." He is 
possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, ever im- 
pelling him to push his premises to new conclusions with- 
out ever allowing him time to compare them with the facts. 
No doubt we are meant to regard him as a learned man ; 
but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very early 
in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of 
a weak receptive mind, overladen with moro knowledge 
than it could digest, but rather those of an over-active in- 
telligence, far more deeply and constantly concerned with 
its own processes than with the thoughts of others. Tris- 
tram, indeed, dwells pointedly on the fact that his father's 
dialectical skill was not the result of training, and that he 
owed nothing to the logic of the schools. " He was cer- 
tainly," says his son, "irresistible both in his orations and 
disputations," but that was because "he was born an orator 
{OeohiCaKToo). Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the ele- 
ments of logic and rhetoric were so blended in him, and 
withal he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and 
passions of his respondent, that Nature might have stood 
up and said, * This man is eloquent.' And yet," continues 
the filial panegyric, 

" He had never read Cicero nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Aristotle, 
nor Longinus among the ancients, nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor 
Ramus, nor Farnaby among the moderns : and what is more astonish- 
ing he had never in his whole hfe the least light or spark of subtilty 



IV.] " TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND II. 45 

struck into his mind by one single lecture upon Crackentliorpe or 
Burgersdicius or any Dutch commentator : he knew not so much as 
in what the difference of. an argument ad ignorantiam and an argu- 
ment ad hondiiem consisted ; and when he went up along with me to 
enter my name at Jesus College, in * * * *, it was a matter of just 
wonder with my worthy tutor and two or three Fellows of that learned 
society that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools 
should be able to work after that fashion with them." 



Surely we all know men of this kind, and the consterna- 
tion — comparable only to that of M. Jourdain under the 
impromptu carte -and -tierce of his servant-maid — which 
their sturdy if informal dialectic will often spread among 
many kinds of "learned societies." But such men are 
certainly not of the class which Scott supposed to have 
been ridiculed in the character of Walter Shandy. 

Among the crotchets of this born dialectician was a the- 
ory as to the importance of Christian names in determin- 
ing the future behaviour and destiny of the children to 
whom they are given ; and, whatever admixture of jest 
there might have been in some of his other fancies, in this 
his son affirms he was absolutely serious. He solemnly 
maintained the opinion "that there was a strange kind of 
magic bias which good or bad names, as he called them, 
irresistibly impressed upon our character and conduct." 
How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere 
inspiration of their names have been rendered worthy of 
them ! And how many, he would add, are there who might 
have done exceedino- well in the world had not their char- 
acters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd 
into nothing ! He was astonished at parents failing to 
perceive that " when once a vile name was wrongfully or 
injudiciously given, 'twas not like a case of a man's charac- 
ter, which, when wronged, might afterwards be cleared ; 



46 STERNE. [chap. 

and possibly some time or other, if not in the man's life, 
at least after his death, be somehow or other set to rights 
with the world." This name-giving, injury, he would say, 
*' could never be undone ; nay, he doubted whether an Act 
of Parliament could reach it ; he knew, as well as you, that 
the Legislature assumed a power over surnames; but for 
very strong reasons, which he could give, it had never yet 
adventured, he would say, to go a step further." 

With all this extravagance, however, there was com- 
bined an admirable affectation of sobriety. Mr. Shandy 
would have us believe that he was no blind slave to his 
theory. He was quite willing to admit the existence of 
names which could not affect the character either for 
good or evil — Jack, Dick, and Tom, for instance; and 
such the philosopher styled " neutral names," affirming of 
them, *' without a satire, that there had been as many 
knaves and fools at least as wise and good men since the 
world began, who had indifferently borne them, so that, 
like equal forces acting against each other in contrary 
directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each 
other's effects; for which reason he would often declare 
he would not give a cherry-stone to choose among them. 
Bob, which was my brother's name, was another of these 
neutral kinds of Christian names which operated very lit- 
tle either way ; and as my father happened to be at Epsom 
when it was given him, he would ofttimes thank Heaven 
it was no worse." Forewarned of this peculiarity of Mr. 
Shandy's, the reader is, of course, prepared to hear that of 
all the names in the universe the philosopher had the most 
unconquerable aversion for Tristram, " the lowest and most 
contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world." He 
would break off in the midst of one of his frequent dis- 
putes on the subject of names, and "in a spirited epipho- 



IV.] " TRISTKAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND II. 41 

nciiia, or rather erotesis," demand of his antagonist "wheth- 
er he would take upon him to say he had ever remembered, 
whether he had ever read, or whether he had ever heard 
tell of a man called Tristram performing anything great or 
worth recording. No, he would say. Tristram ! the thing 
is impossible." It only remained that he should have pub- 
lished a book in defence of the belief, and sure enough 
" in the year sixteen," two years before the birth of his 
second son, " he was at the pains of writing an express 
dissertation simply upon the word Tristram, showing the 
world with great candour and modesty the grounds of his 
great abhorrence to the name." And with this idea Sterne 
continues to amuse himself at interv^als till the end of the 
chapter. 

That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, 
of course, scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not sub- 
stance enough — few of Sterne's jests have — to stand the 
process of continual attrition to which he subjects it. But 
the mere historic gravity. with which the various turns of 
this monomania are recorded — to say nothing of the sel- 
dom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style — prevents 
the thing from ever becoming utterly tiresome. On the 
whole, however, one begins to grow impatient for more of 
the same sort as the three admirable chapters on the Rev. 
Mr. Yorick, and is not sorry to get to the opening of the 
second volume, with its half- tender, half - humorous, and 
wholly delightful account of Uncle Toby's difficulties in 
describing the siege operations before Namur, and of the 
happy chance by which these difficulties made him ulti- 
mately the fortunate possessor of a " hobby." 

Throughout this volume there are manifest signs of 
Sterne's unceasing interest in his own creations, and of his 
increasing consciousness of creative power. Captain Toby 



48 STERXE. [chap. iv. 

Shandy is but just Hglitly sketched-in in the first vohime, 
while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance on the 
scene at all ; but before the end of the second we know 
both of them thoroughly, within and without. Indeed, one 
might almost say that in the first half-dozen chapters which 
so excellently recount the origin of the corporal's fortifica- 
tion scheme, and the wounded officer's delighted accept- 
ance of it, every trait in the simple characters — alike yet 
so different in their simplicity — of master and of man be- 
comes definitely fixed in the reader's mind. And the total 
difference between the second and the first volume in point 
of fulness, variety, and colour is most marked. The artist, 
the inventor, the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, 
in fact, as distinct from the humorous essayist, would al- 
most seem to have started into being as we pass from tlie 
one volume to the other. There is nothino; in the droll- 
eries of the first volume — in the broad jests upon Mr. 
Shandy's crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the 
intellectual collision between these crotchets and his broth- 
er's plain sense — to indicate the kind of power displayed 
in that remarkable colloquy a quatre^ which begins with 
the arrival of Dr. Slop and ends with Corporal Trim's re- 
cital of the Sermon on Conscience. Wit, humour, irony, 
quaint learning, shrewd judgment of men and things, of 
these Sterne had displayed abundance already; but it is 
not in the earlier but in the later half of the first instal- 
ment of Tristram Shandy that we first become conscious 
that he is something more than the possessor of all these 
things ; that he is gifted with the genius of creation, and 
has sent forth new beings into that world of immortal 
shadows which to many of us is more real than our own. 



CHAPTER V. 

LONDON TRIUMPHS. FIRST SET OF SERMONS.- 

SHANDY," VOLS. III. AND IV. COXWOLD. VOLS. V. 

AND VI. — FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT. — PARIS. 

TOULOUSE. 

(1760-1762.) 

Sterne alighted from the York mail, just as Byron "awoke 
one morning," to " find himself famous." Seldom indeed 
has any lion so suddenly discovered been pursued so eager- 
Iv and bv such a distino^uished crowd of hunters. The 
chase was remarkable enough to have left a lasting im- 
pression on the spectators; for it was several years after 
(in 1773) that Dr. Johnson, by way of fortifying his very 
just remark that " any man who has a name or who has 
the powder of pleasing will be generally invited in Lon- 
don," observed gruffly that " the man Sterne," he was told, 
" had had engagements for three months." And truly it 
would appear from abundant evidence that "the man 
Sterne" gained such a social triumph as might well have 
turned a stronger head than his. Within twenty-four 
hours after his arrival his lodgings in Pall Mall were be- 
sieged by a crowd of fashionable visitors ; and in a few 
weeks he had probably made the acquaintance of " every- 
body who was anybody " in the London society of that 
day. 

How thoroughly he relished the delights of celebrity is 
3* 



50 STERNE. [chap. 

revealed, with a simple vanity which almost disarms criti- 
cism, in many a passage of his correspondence. In one 
of his earliest letters to Miss Fourmantelle we find him 
proudly relating to her how already he "was engaged to 
ten noblemen and men of fashion." Of Garrick, who had 
warmly welcomed the humourist whoce merits he had been 
the first to discover, Sterne says that he had " promised 
him at dinner to numbers of great people.*" Amongst 
these great people who sought him out for themselves 
was that discerning patron of ability in every shape, Lord 
Rockingham. In one of the many letters which Madame 
de Medalle flung dateless upon the world, but which from 
internal evidence we can assign to the early months of 
1760, Sterne writes that he is about to "set off with a 
grand retinue of Lord Rockingham's (in whose suite I 
move) for Windsor" to witness, it should seem, an instal- 
lation of a Knight of the Garter. It is in his letters to 
Miss Fourmantelle, however, that his almost boyish exulta- 
tion at his London triumph discloses itself most frankly. 
"My rooms," he writes, "are filling every hour with great 
people of the first rank, who strive who shall most honour 
me." Never, he believes, had such homage been rendered 
to any man by devotees so distinguished. "The honours 
paid me were the greatest that were ever known from the 
great." 

The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, 
altogether an attractive one. It is somewhat wanting in 
dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at times 
slightly ridiculous. But we must not judge Sterne in this 
matter by too severe a standards He was by nature nei- 
ther a dignified nor a self-contained man : he had a head 
particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation ; and it must 
be allowed that few men's power of resisting giddiness at 



v.] LONDON TRIUMPHS. 51 

previously unexplored altitudes was ever so severely tried. 
It was not only " the great " in the sense of the high in 
rank and social distinction by whom he was courted ; he 
was welcomed also by the eminent in genius and learning ; 
and it would be no very difficult task for him to flatter 
himself that it was the latter form of recognition which 
he really valued most. Much, at any rate, in the way of 
undue elation may be forgiven to a country clergyman 
who suddenly found himself the centre of a court, which 
was regularly attended by statesmen, wits, and leaders of 
fashion, and with whom even bishops condescended to 
open gracious diplomatic communication. *' Even all the 
bishops," he writes, "have sent their compliments;" and 
though this can hardly have been true of the whole Epis- 
copal Bench, it is certain that Sterne received something 
more than a compliment from one bishop, who was a host 
in himself. He was introduced by Garrick to Warburton, 
and received high encouragement from that formidable 
prelate.^ 

The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more 
solid gains than that of mere celebrity, or even than the 
somewhat precarious money profits which depend on lit- 
erary vogue. Only a few weeks after his arrival in town 
he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the curacy of 
Coxw^old, '' a sweet retirement," as he describes it, " in 
comparison of Sutton," at which he was in future to pass 
most of the time spent by him in Yorkshire. What ob- 
tained him this piece of preferment is unknown. It may 
be that Tristram Shandy drew the Yorkshire peer's atten- 

^ It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss Four- 
mantelle that Sterne received something more substantial from the 
Bishop, in the shape of a purse of gold ; and this strange present 
gave rise to a scandal on which something will be said hereafter. 



52 STERNE. [chap. 

tion to the fact that there was a Yorkshirenian of genius 
living within a few miles of a then vacant benefice in his 
lordship's gift, and that this was enough for him. But 
Sterne himself says — in writing a year or so afterwards to 
a lady of his acquaintance — " I hope I have been of some 
service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited me ;" 
and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by 
the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly in- 
timacy with the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date 
than this, we may dismiss idle tales about Sterne's having 
'^ black-mailed " the patron out of a presentation to a ben- 
efice worth no more, after all, than some VOZ. a year net. 

There is somewhat more substance, however, in the 
scandal which got abroad with reference to a certain al- 
leged transaction between Sterne and Warburton. Be- 
fore Sterne had been many days in London, and while 
yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the 
newest gossip, a story found its way into currency to the 
effect that the new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found 
it advisable to protect himself against the satiric humour 
of the author of the Tristram Shandy by a substantial 
present of money. Coming to Garrick's ears, it was re- 
peated by him — whether seriously or in jest — to Sterne, 
from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame 
de Medalle's collection has been studiously hidden away 
amongst the correspondence of seven years later. ^' 'Twas 
for all the world," he began, *^ like a cut across my finger 
with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood — gave it a suck, 
wrapt it up, and thought no more about it. . . . The story 
you told me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning" 
— (the scandal was, that Warburton had been threatened 
with caricature in the next volume of the novel, under the 
guise of the hero's tutor) — " this vile story, I say, though 



v.] LONDON TRIUMPHS. 53 

I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little 
from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins 
my simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected 
an air, usual in sucli accidents, of feeling less than I had." 
And he goes on to repudiate, it will be observed, not so 
much the moral offence of corruption, in receiving money 
to spare Warburton, as .the intellectual solecism of select- 
ing him for ridicule. '' What the devil !" he exclaims, " is 
there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools of 
misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor 
of for my Tristram — are we so run out of stock that there 
is no one lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, 
pudding-head chap amongst our doctors . . . but I must 
disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton ?" Later 
on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom 
the scandal had reached throuo;h a " society iournal " of 
the time, he asks whether people would suppose he would 
be " such a fool as to fall foul of ,Dr. W^arburton, my best 
friend, by representing him so weak a man ; or by telling 
such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy off the 
tutorship of Tristram — or that I should be fool enough to 
own that I had taken a purse for that purpose?" It will 
be remarked that Sterne does not here deny having re- 
ceived a purse from Warburton, but only his having re- 
ceived it by w^ay of black-mail : and the most mysterious 
part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the 
strange present of a "purse of gold" from Warburton 
(whom at that time he did not know nor had ever seen) ; 
and that he admits as much in one of his letters to Miss 
Fourmantelle. "I had a purse of guineas given me yes- 
terday by a Bishop," he writes, triumphantly, but without 
volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift. 
Sterne's letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to 



54 STERNE. [chap. 

Warburton ; and the Bishop thanks Garrick for having 
procured for him " the confutation of an impertinent story 
the first moment I heard of it." This, however, can hard- 
ly count for much. If Warburton had really wished Sterne 
to abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious — 
and for much the same reasons — to conceal the fact as to 
suppress the caricature. He would naturally have the dis- 
closure of it I'eported to Sterne for formal contradiction, 
as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the barsfain between 
them. The epithet of ** irrevocable scoundrel," which he 
afterwards applied to Sterne, is of less importance, as pro- 
ceeding from Warburton, than it would have been had it 
come from any one not habitually employing Warburton's 
peculiar vocabulary ; but it at least argues no very cordial 
feeling on the Bishop's side. And, on the whole, one re- 
grets to feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel, far 
less confident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleas- 
ant story than could be wished. It is impossible to for- 
get, however, that while the ethics of this matter were un- 
doubtedly less strict in those days than they are — or, at 
any rate, are recognized as being — in our own, there is 
nothing in Sterne's character to make us suppose him to 
have been at all in advance of the morality, of his time. 

The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to 
take possession of his temporalities. His London triumph 
had not yet run its course. The first edition of Vols. I. 
and II. of Tristram Shandy was exhausted in some three 
months. In April, Dodsley brought out a second ; and, 
concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there ap- 
peared — in somewhat incongruous companionship — the 
announcement, " Speedily will be published. The Sermons 
of Mr. Yorick." The judicious Dodsley, or possibly the 
judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of this 



v.] FIRST SET OF SERMONS. 55 

kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a 
series of sermons by the very iinclerical lion of the day. 
There would — they, no doubt, thought — be an undeniable 
piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity 
in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose- 
tongued droll ; and the more staid and serious the sermon, 
the more effective the contrast. There need not have been 
much trouble in finding the kind of article required ; and 
we may be tolerably sure that, even if Sterne did not per- 
ceive that fact for himself, his publisher hastened to inform 
him that "anything would do." Two of his pulpit dis- 
courses, the Assize Sermon and the Charity Sermon, had 
already been thought worthy of publication by their au- 
thor in a separate form ; and the latter of these found a 
place in the series; while the rest seem to have been sim- 
ply the chance sweepings of the parson's sermon-drawer. 
The critics who find wit, eccentricity, flashes of Shandy- 
ism, and what not else of the same sort in these discourses, 
must be able — or so it seems to me — -to discover these 
phenomena anywhere. To the best of my ow^n judgment 
the Sermons are — with but few and partial exceptions — 
of the most commonplace character ; platitudinous with 
the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, and insipid with the 
cranibe repetita of a hundred thousand homilies. A single 
extract will fully suffice for a specimen of Sterne's pre- 
Shandian homiletic style ; his post-Shandian manner was 
very different, as we shall see. The preacher is discours- 
ing upon the well-worn subject of the inconsistencies of 
human character : 

" If such a contrast was only observable in the different stages of 
a man's life, it would cease to be either a matter of wonder or of 
just reproach. Age, experience, and much reflection may naturally 
enough be supposed to alter a man's sense of things, and so entirely 



56 STERNE. [chap. 

to transform him that, not only in outward appearance but in the 
very cast and turn of his mind, he may be as unlike and different 
from the man he was twenty or thirty years ago as he ever was from 
anything of his own species. This, I say, is naturally to be account- 
ed for, and in some cases might be praiseworthy too ; but the obser- 
vation is to be made of men in the same period of their lives that in 
the same day, sometimes on the very same action, they are utterly in- 
consistent and irreconcilable with themselves. Look at the man in one 
light, and he shall seem wise, penetrating, discreet, and brave ; behold 
him in another point of view, and you see a creature all over folly 
and indiscretion, weak and timorous as cowardice and indiscretion 
can make him. A man shall appear gentle, courteous, and benevo- 
lent to all mankind ; follow him into his own house, maybe you see 
a tyrant morose and savage to all whose happiness depends upon his 
kindness. A third, in his general behaviour, is found to be gener- 
ous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of 
the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole sub- 
stance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless 
and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. 
Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures 
and opinions of all the rest of the world besides : temperate in his 
appetites, intemperate in his tongue ; shall have too much conscience 
and religion to cheat the man who trusts him, and perhaps as far as 
the business of debtor and creditor extends shall be just and scrupu- 
lous to the uttermost mite ; yet in matters of full or great concern, 
where he is to have the handling of the party's reputation and good 
name, the dearest, the tenderest property the man has, he will do him 
irreparable damage, and rob him there without measure or pity." — 
Sermon XI. — On Evil Speaking. 

There is clearly nothing particularly striking in all that, 
even conveyed as it is in Sterne's effective, if loose and 
careless, style ; and it is no unfair sample of the whole. 
The calculation, however, of the author and his shrewd 
publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic merits or de- 
merits of these sermons, they would "take" on the strength 
of the authors name ; nor, it would seem, w^as their calcu- 
lation disappointed. The edition of this series of sermons 



v.] FIRST SET OF SERMONS. 57 

now lying before me is numbered the sixth, and its date 
is 1764; which represents a demand for a new edition 
every nine months or so, over a space of four years. They 
may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, in partially reconciling* a 
certain serious-minded portion of the public to the author. 
Sterne evidently hoped that they might ; for we find him 
sending a copy to Warburton, in the month of June, im- 
mediately after the publication of the book, and receiving 
in return a letter of courteous thanks, and full of excellent 
advice as to the expediency of avoiding scandal by too 
hazardous a style of writing in the future. Sterne, in re- 
ply, protests that he would " willingly give no offence to 
mortal by anything which could look like the least viola- 
tion of either decency or good manners ;" but — and it is 
an important " but" — he cannot promise to "mutilate ev- 
erything" in Tristram *'down to the prudish humour of 
every particular " (individual), though he will do his best ; 
but, in any case, '* laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly as 
I can." And laugh he did, and ill such Rabelaisian fashion 
that the Bishop (somewhat inconsistently for a critic who 
had welcomed Sterne on the appearance of the first two 
volumes expressly as the " English Rabelais ") remarked 
of him afterwards with characteristic vigour, in a letter 
to a friend, that he fears the fellow is an " irrevocable 
scoundrel." 

The volumes, however, which earned " the fellow " this 
Episcopal benediction were not given to the world till the 
next year. At the end of May or beginning of June, 1760, 
Sterne, went to his new home at Coxwold, and his letters 
soon begin to show him to us at work upon further records 
of Mr. Shandy's philosophical theory - spinning and the 
simpler pursuits of his excellent brother. It is probable 

that this year, 1760, was, on the w^hole, the happiest year 
E 



58 STERNE. [chap. 

of Sterne's life. His health, though always feeble, had 
not 3^et finally given way ; and though the " vile cough " 
which was to bring him more than once to death's door, 
and at last to force it open, was already troubling him, he 
had that within him which made it easy to bear up 
against all such physical ills. His spirits, in fact, were at 
their highest. His worldly affairs were going at least as 
smoothly as they ever went. He was basking in that 
sunshine of fame which was so delightful to a tempera- 
ment differing from that of the average Englishman, as 
does the physique of the Southern races from that of the 
hardier children of the North ; and lastly, he was exulting 
in a new-born sense of creative power which no doubt 
made the composition of the earlier volumes of Tristram 
a veritable labour of love. 

But the witty division of literary spinners into silk- 
worms and spiders — those who spin because they are full, 
and those w^ho do so because they are empty — is not 
exhaustive. There are human silk-worms who become 
gradually transformed into spiders — men who begin writ- 
ing in order to unburden a full imagination, and who, 
long after that process has been completely performed, 
continue writing in order to fill an empty bell-y; and 
though Sterne did not live long enough to " write himself 
out," there are certain indications that he would not have 
left off writing if and when he felt that this stage of 
exhaustion had arrived. His artistic impulses were curi- 
ously combined with a distinct admixture of the " pot- 
boiler " spirit ; and it was with something of the compla- 
cency of an annuitant that he looked forward to giving 
the public a couple of volumes of Tristram Shandy every 
year as long as they would stand it. In these early days, 
however„there was no necessity even to discuss the prob- 



v.] "TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. III. AND IV. 59 

able period either of the writer's inspiration or of the 
reader's appetite. At present the public were as eager to 
consume more Shandyism as Sterne was ready to produce 
it : the demand was as active as the supply was easy. By 
the end of the year Vols. III. and IV. were in the press, 
and on January 27, 1761, they made their appearance. 
They had been disposed of in advance to Dodsley for 380/. 
— no bad terms of remuneration in those days ; but it is 
still likely enough that the publisher made a profitable 
bargain. The new volumes sold freely, and the public 
laughed at them as heartily as their two predecessors. 
Their author's vogue in London, whither he went in De- 
cember, 1760, to superintend publication, was as great 
during the next spring as it had been in the last. The 
tide of visitors again set in in all its former force and 
volume towards the "genteel lodgings." His dinner list 
was once more full, and he was feasted and flattered by 
wits, beaux, courtiers, politicians, and titled -lady lion- 
hunters as sedulously as ever. His letters, especially those 
to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington, abound, a« before, 
in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how de- 
licious a sense of self-importance must he have written 
these words : " You made me and my friends very merry 
with the accounts current at York of my being forbad the 
Court, but they do not consider what a considerable per- 
son they make of me when they suppose either my going 
or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.'s 
head ; and for those about him, I have the honour either 
to stand so personally well-known to them, or to be so 
well represented by those of the first rank, as to fear no 
accident of the kind." Amusing, too, is it to note 
the familiarity, as of an old habitue of Ministerial ante- 
chambers, with which this country parson discusses the 



60 STERNE. [chap. 

political changes of that interesting year ; though scarcely 
more amusing, perhaps, than the solemnity with which his 
daughter disguises the identity of the new Premier under 
the title B— — e ; and by a similar use of initials attempts 
to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. 
had been removed from the place of Groom of the Cham- 
bers, and that Sir F. D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of 
the Exchequer. Occasionally, however, the interest of his 
letters changes from personal to public, and we get a 
glimpse of scenes and personages that have become his- 
torical. He was present in the House of Commons at the 
first grand debate on the German war after the Great 
Commoner's retirement from office — " the pitcheci battle," 
as Sterne calls it, " wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and 
thrown down the gauntlet'' in defence of his military 
policy. Thus he describes it : 

" There never was so full a House — the gallery full to the top — I 
was there all the day ; when lo ! a political fit of the gout seized the 
great combatant — he entered not the lists. Beckford got up and 
begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable friend there, 
to put off the debate — it could not be done : so Beckford rose up 
and made a most long, passionate, incoherent speech in defence of 
the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was 
carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[han- 
cellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly. . . . Legge 
answered Beckford very rationally and coolly. Lord N. spoke long. 
Sir F. D [ash wood] maintained the German war was most pei-ni- 
cious. . . . Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour 
with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things re- 
lating to these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or 
three conversations which had passed between the K. and himself 
relative to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.'s 
character. This was with regard to the money the K. had secretly 
furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account of the Han- 
over-^bre brought us to discharge. Beckford and Barrington 



v.] COXWOLD. 61 

abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it, 
and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were 
the same as at the Peace of Utrecht — that the people behind the 
curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so 
were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own inter- 
ests. After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will cer- 
tainly end in one." 

And then the letter, recurring to personal matters to- 
wards the close, records the success of Vols. III. and IV. : 
" One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the oth- 
er half cry it up to the skies — the best is they abuse and 
buy it, and at such a rate that we are going on wiih a sec- 
ond edition as fast as possible." This was written only in 
the first week of March, so that the edition must have been 
exhausted in little more than a month. It was, indeed^ 
another triumph ; and all through this spring up to mid- 
summer did Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, 
with three distinct flocks awaiting a renewal of his pastoral 
ministrations in Yorkshire, it would scarcely have done for 
him, even in those easy-going days of the Establishment, 
to take up his permanent abode at the capital ; and early 
in July he returned to Coxvvold. 

From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to 
darken, and from the beginning of the next year onward 
Sterne's life was little better than a truceless struggle with 
the disease to which he was destined, prematurely, to suc- 
cumb. The wretched constitution which, in common with 
nis short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited proba- 
bly from his father, already began to show signs of break- 
ing up. Invalid from the fitst, it had doubtless been weak- 
ened by the hardships of Sterne's early years, and yet 
further, perhaps, by the excitements and dissipations of 
his London life; nor was the change from the gaieties of 



62 STERNE. [chap. 

the capital to hard literary labour in a country parsonage 
calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. 
Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Cox- 
wold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, 
soon became irksome to him. The very reaction begotten 
of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a 
dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The change 
from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull 
round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well 
have been depressing to a mind better balanced and bal- 
lasted than his. To him, with his light, pleasure -loving 
nature, it was as the return of the schoolboy from panto- 
mimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights of Dr. 
Swishtail's ; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne re- 
veals his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of 
the Doctor's pupils : 

" I rejoice you are in London — rest you there in peace ; here 'tis the 
devil. You were a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you 
told me I should, but not because a thin, death -doing, pestiferous 
north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret 
fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east 
wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid 
motion to absolute rest was too violent. I should have walked about 
the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed 
through before I entered upon my rest ; I stayed but a moment, and 
I have been here but a few, to satisfy me. I have not managed my 
miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not 
poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer 
me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just 
now lay down and die.'* 

It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an 
hour's time "I'll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a 
monkey, and forget it all," but such sudden revulsions of 
high spirits can hardly be allowed to count for much 



T.] COXWOLR 63 

against the prevailing tone of discontented ennui which 
pervades this letter. 

Apart, moreover, from Sterne's regrets of London, liis 
country home was becoming from other causes a less pleas- 
ant place of abode. His relations with his wife were get- 
ting less and less cordial every year. With a perversity 
sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, 
Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept w^ith enthusiasm the role 
of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant 
husband's triumphs. Accept it, of course, she did, being 
unable, indeed, to help herself; but it is clear that when 
Sterne returned home after one of his six months' revels 
in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had been vege- 
tating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in 
the habit of welcominor him with effusion. Perceivino- so 
clearly that her husband preferred the world's society to 
hers, she naturally, perhaps, refused to disguise her prefer- 
ence of her own society to his. Their estrangement, in 
short, had grown apace, and had already brought them to 
that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so com- 
fortable and so hopeless — secure alike against the risk of 
** scenes " and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its 
exemption from amantium iroe against all possibility of 
redintegratio amoris. To such perfection, indeed, had the 
feeling been cultivated on both sides, that Sterne, in the 
letter above quoted, can write of his conjugal relations in 
this philosophic strain : 

" As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is 
easy, but the world is not, and bad I stnyed from her a second long- 
er it would have been a burning shame — else she declares herself 
happier without me. But not in anger is this declaration made (the 
most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense, 
built on sound experience. She hopes you will be able to strike a 



64 STERNE. fCHAP. 

bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Eu- 
rope, and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are 
so high in her favour at present. She swears you are a fellow of wit, 
though humorous ;^ a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic, 
and (bating the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you 
like the simile ?'^ 

There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the 
suggestion that Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her hus- 
band's friends was wholly based upon the expectation 
that he would rid her of her husband ; but mutual indif- 
ference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty advanced 
stage before such a remark could, even half in jest, be 
possible. And with one more longing, lingering look at 
the scenes which he had quitted for a lot like that of 
the Duke of Buckingham's dog, upon whom his master 
pronounced the maledictory wish that "he were married 
and lived in the country," this characteristic letter con- 
cludes : 

'' Oh, Lord ! now are you going to Ranelagh to-night, and I am sit- 
ting sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried out to him 
and said, ' What do'st thou here, Elijah V 'Tis well that the spirit 
does not make the same at Cox wold, for unless for the few sheep 
left me to take care of in the wilderness, I might as well, nay, better, 
be at Mecca. When we find we can, by a shifting of places, run 
away from ourselves, what think you of a jaunt there before we 
finally pay a visit to the Vale of Jehoshaphat ? As ill a fame as we 
have, I trust I shall one day or other see you face to face, so tell the 
two colonels if they love good company to live righteously and so- 
berly, as you do^ and then they will have no doubts or dangers within 

^ It is curious to note, as a point in the chronology of language, 
how exclusive is Sterne's employment of the words '* humour," '' hu- 
mourists," in their older sense of " whimsicality," " an eccentric." 
The later change in its meaning gives to the word " though " iu the 
above passage an almost comic effect. 



Y.] "TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. V. AND VI. 65 

OP without them. Present my best and warmest wishes to them, 
9\d advise the eldest to prop up his spirits, and get a rich dowager 
before the conclusion of the peace. Why will not the advice suit 
both, par nohile fratrum V 

In conclusion, he tells his friend that the next morning, 
if Heaven permit, he begins the fifth volume of Shandy^ 
and adds, defiantly, that he " cares not a curse for the 
critics," but " will load my vehicle with what goods He 
sends me, and they may take 'em off my hands or let 'em 
alone." 

The allusions to foreign travel in this letter were made 
with something more than a jesting intent. Sterne had 
ah'eady begun to be seriously alarmed, and not without 
reason, about the condition of his health. He shrank 
from facing; another Eno-lish winter, and meditated a 
southward flight so soon as he should have finished his 
fifth and sixth volumes, and seen them safe in the print- 
er's hands. His publisher he had changed, for what rea- 
son is not known, and the firm of Becket h De Hondt had 
taken the place of Dodsley. Sterne hoped by the end of 
the year to be free to depart from England, and already 
he had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical supe- 
riors for the necessary leave of absence. He seems to have 
been treated with all consideration in the matter. His 
Archbishop, on being applied to, at once excused him from 
parochial work for a year, and promised, if it should be 
necessary, to double that term. Fortified with this per- 
mission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and daughter, 
and betook himself to London, with his now completed 
volumes, at the setting in of the winter. On the 21st of 
December they made their appearance, and in about three 
weeks from that date their author left England, with the 
intention of wintering in the South of France. There 
4 



66 STERNE. [chap. 

were difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which 
had first to be faced— a pecuniary difficulty, which Gar- 
rick met by a loan of 20/., and a political difficulty, for 
the removal of which Sterne had to employ the good 
offices of new acquaintance Jater on. He reached Paris 
about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a 
reception which interposed, as might have been expected, 
the most effectual of obstacles to his further progress 
southward. He was received in Paris with open arms, 
and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the phil- 
osophic salons. Again was the old intoxicating cup pre- 
sented to his lips — this time, too, with more dexterous than 
English hands — and again did he drink deeply of it. " My 
head is turned," he writes to Garrick, "with what I see, 
and the unexpected honour I have met with here. Tris- 
tram was almost as much known here as in London, at 
least among your men of condition and learning, and has 
got me introduced into so many circles ('tis comme a 
Londres) I have just now a fortnight's dinners and sup- 
pers on my hands." We may venture to doubt whether 
French politeness had not been in one respect taken some- 
what too seriously by the flattered Englishman, and w^hether 
it was much more than the name and general reputation 
of Tristram^ which was "almost as much known" in Paris 
as in London. The dinners and suppers, however, were, at 
any rate, no figures of speech, but very liberal entertain- 
ments, at which Sterne appears to have disported himself 
with all his usual unclerical abandon, " I Shandy it away," 
he writes in his boyish fashion to Garrick, " fifty times 
more than I was ever wont, talk more nonsense than ever 
you heard me talk in all your days, and to all sorts of 
people. * Qui le diable est cet homme-la?' said Choiseul, 
t'other day, ' ce Chevalier Shandy?'" [We might be lis- 



V.} FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT. 67 

teuing to one of Thackeray's Irish heroes.] '' You'll think 
me as vain as a devil was I to tell you the rest of the dia- 
logue." But there were distinguished Frenchmen who 
were ready to render to the English author more impor- 
tant services than that of offering him hospitality and 
flattery. Peace had not been formally concluded between 
France and England, and the passport with which Sterne 
had been graciously furnished by Pitt was not of force 
enough to dispense him from making special application 
to the French Government for permission to remain in the 
country. In this request he was influentially backed. 
** My application," he writes, " to the Count de Choiseul 
goes on swimmingly, for not only M. Pelletiere (who by- 
the-bye sends ten thousand civilities to you and Mrs. G.) 
lias undertaken my affair, but the Count de Limbourg. 
The Baron d'Holbach has offered any security for the in- 
offensiveness of my behaviour in France — 'tis more, you 
rogue ! than you will do." And then the orthodox, or 
professedly orthodox, English divine, goes on to describe 
the character and habits of his strangje new friend: "This 
Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here, the great 
protector of wits and of the savans who are no wits ; keeps 
open house three days a week — his house is now, as yours 
was to me, my own — he lives at great expense." Equally 
communicative is he as to his other great acquaintances. 
Among these were the Count de Bissie, whom by an '* odd 
incident" (as it seemed to his unsuspecting vanity) "I 
found reading Tristram when I was introduced to him, 
which I was," he adds (without perceiving the connexion 
between this fact and the ** incident"), "at his desire;" 
Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards the Lord Macart- 
ney of Chinese celebrity), and the Duke of Orleans (not 
yet Egalite) himself, " who has suffered my portrait to be 



68 STERNE. [chap. 

added to the number of some odd men in his collection, 
and has had it taken most expressively at full length by a 
gentleman who lives with him." Nor was it only in the 
delights of society that Sterne was now revelling. He was 
passionately fond of the- theatre, and his letters to Garrick 
are full of eager criticism of the great French performers, 
intermingled with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied 
than delicate, of their famous English rival. Of Clairon, 
in Tphigenie^ he says " she is extremely great. Would to 
God you had one or two like her. What a luxury to see 
you with one of such power in the same interesting scene ! 
But 'tis too much." Again he writes : " The French com- 
edy I seldom visit ; they act scarce anything but tragedies ; 
and the Clairon is great, and Mdlle. Dumesmil in some 
parts still greater than her. Yet I cannot bear preaching 
— I fancy I got a surfeit of it in my younger days." And 
in a later letter : 

" After a vile suspension of three weeks, we are beginning with 
our comedies and operas. Yours I hear never flourished more ; here 
the comic actors were never so low; the tragedians hold up their 
heads in all senses. I have known one little man support the theat- 
rical world like a David Atlas upon his shoulders, but Preville can't 
do half as much here, though Mad. Clairon stands by him and sets 
her back to his. She is very great, however, and highly improved 
since you saw her. She also supports her dignity at table, and has 
her public day every Thursday, when she gives to eat (as they say 
here) to all that are hungry and dry. You are much talked of here, 
and much expected, as soon as the peace will let you. These two 
last days you have happened to engross the whole conversation at 
the great houses where I was at dinner. 'Tis the greatest problem 
in nature in this meridian that one and the same man should possess 
such tragic and comic powers, and in such an equilibrio as to divide 
the world for which of the two Nature intended him." 

And while on this subject of the stage let us pause for 



v.] PARIS. 69 

a moment to glance at an incident which connects Sterne 
with one of the most famous of his French contempora- 
ries. He has been asked " by a lady of talent," he tells 
Garrick, " to read a tragedy, and conjecture if it would do 
for you. 'Tis from the plan of Diderot ; and, possibly, 
half a translation of it : The Natural Son, or the Triumph 
oj Virtue, in five acts. It has too much sentiment in it 
(at least for me); the speeches too long, and savour too 
much of preaching. This may be a second reason it is 
not to my taste — 'tis all love, love, love throughout, with- 
out much separation in the characters. So I fear it would 
not do for your stage, and perhaps for the very reason 
which recommends it to a French one." It is curious to 
see the " adaptator cerebrosuga " at work in those days as 
in these ; though not, in this instance, as it seems, with as 
successful results. The Natural Son, or the Triumph of 
Virtue, is not known to have reached either English read- 
ers or English theatrical audiences. The French original, 
as we know, fared scarcely better. *^ It was not until 1771," 
says Diderot's latest English biographer, " that the direc- 
tors of the French Comedy could be induced to place Le 
Fils Naturel on the stage. The actors detested their task, 
and, as we can well believe, went sulkily through parts 
which they had not taken the trouble to master. The pub- 
lic felt as little interest in the piece as the actors had done,^ 
and after one or two representations, it was put aside."^ 

Another, and it is to be guessed a too congenial, ac- 
quaintance formed by Sterne in Paris was that of Crebil- 
lon ; and with him he concluded " a convention," unedi- 
fying enough, whether in jest or earnest: **As soon as I 
get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostula- 
tory letter upon the indecorums of T, Shandy, which is. 
^ Morley : Diderot aiid the EneyclopcBdists, ii. 305.. 



70 STERNE. [chap. 

to be answered by recrimination upon the liberties in his 
own works. These are to be printed together — Crebillon 
against Sterne, Sterne against Crebillon — the copy to be 
sold, and the money equally divided. This is good Swiss- 
policy," he adds ; and the idea (which was never carried 
out) had certainly the merit of ingenuity, if no other. 

The words "as soon as I get to Toulouse," in a letter 
written from Paris on the 10th of April, might well have 
reminded Sterne of the strange way in which he had car- 
ried out his intention of " wintering in the South." He 
insists, however, upon the curative effects of his winter of 
gaiety in Paris. " I am recovered greatly," he says ; " and 
if I could spend one whole winter at Toulouse, I should be 
fortified in my inner man beyond all danger of relapsing." 
There was another, too, for whom this change of climate 
had become imperatively necessary. For three winters 
past his daughter Lydia, now fourteen years old, had been 
suffering severely from asthma, and needed to try " the last 
remedy of a warmer and softer air." Her father, therefore, 
was about to solicit passports for his wife and daughter, 
with a view to their joining him at once in Paris, whence, 
after a month's stay, they were to depart together for the 
South. This application for passports he intended, he said, 
to make " this week :" and it would seem that the inten- 
tion was carried out ; but, for reasons explained in a letter 
which Mr. Fitzgerald was the first to publish, it was not 
till the middle of the next month that he was able to make 
preparation for their joining him. From this letter — writ- 
ten to his Archbishop, to request an extension of his leave 
— we learn that while applying for the passports he was 
attacked with a fever, " which has ended the worst way it 
could for me, in a dejluxion (de) poitrine, as the French 
physicians call it. It is generally fatal to weak lungs, so 



v.] PARIS. 11 

that I have lost in ten days all I have gained since I came 
here ; and from a relaxation of ray lungs have lost my 
voice entirely, that 'twill be much if I ever quite recover 
it. This evil sends me directly to Toulouse, for which I 
set out from this place directly my family arrives." Evi- 
dentlv there was no time to be lost, and a week after the 
date of this letter we find him in communication with Mrs. 
and Miss Sterne, and making arrangements for what was, 
in those days, a somewhat formidable undertaking — the 
journey of two ladies from the North of England to the 
centre of France. The correspondence which ensued may 
be said to give us the last pleasant glimpse of Sterne's re- 
lations with his wife. One can hardly help suspecting, of 
course, that it was his solicitude for the safety and com- 
fort of his much-loved daughter that mainly inspired the 
affectionate anxiety which pervades these letters to Mrs. 
Sterne ; but their writer is, at the very least, entitled to 
credit for allowing no difference of tone to reveal itself in 
the terms in which he speaks of wife and child. And, 
whichever of the two he was mainly thinking of, there is 
something very engaging in the thoughtful minuteness of 
his instructions to the two women travellers, the earnest- 
ness of his attempts to inspire them with courage for their 
enterprise, and the sincere fervour of his many commen- 
dations of them to the Divine keeping. The mixture of 
" canny " counsel and pious invocation has frequently a 
droll effect: as when the advice to "give the custom-house 
officers what I told you, and at Calais more, if you have 
much Scotch snuff ;" and " to drink small Rhenish to keep 
you cool, that is, if you like it," is rounded off by the ejac- 
ulation, " So God in Heaven prosper and go along with 
you !" Letter after letter did he send them, full of such 
reminders as that "they have bad pins and vile needles 



72 STERNE. [chap. 

here," that it would be advisable to bring with them a 
strong bottle-screw, and a good stout copper tea-kettle ; till 
at last, in the final words of preparation, his language as- 
sumes something of the solemnity of a general addressing 
his army on the eve of a well-nigh desperate enterprise : 
" Pluck up your spirits — trust in God, in me, and your- 
selves; with this, was you put to it, you would encounter 
all these difficulties ten times told. Write instantly, and 
tell me you triumph over all fears — tell me Lydia is bet- 
ter, and a help-mate to you. You say she grows like me : 
let her show me she does so in her contempt of small dan- 
gers, and fighting against the apprehensions of them, which 
is better still." 

At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken ; and, 
on Thursday, July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter arrived 
in Paris. Their stay there was not long — not much ex- 
tended, probably, beyond the proposed week. For Sterne's 
health had, some ten days before the arrival of his family, 
again given him warning to depart quickly. He had but 
a few weeks recovered from the fever of which he spoke 
in his letter to the Archbishop, when he again broke a 
blood-vessel in his lungs. It happened in the night, and 
"finding in the morning that I was likely to bleed to 
death, I sent immediately," he says, in a sentence which 
quaintly brings out the paradox of contemporary medical 
treatment, **for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms. This 
.saved me " — ^. e, did not kill me — " and, with lying speech- 
less three days, I recovered upon my back in bed: the 
breach healed, and in a week after I got out." But the 
weakness which ensued, and the subsequent " hurrying 
about," no doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife 
and daughter, " made me think it high time to haste to 
Toulouse." Accordingly, about the 20th of the month, 



tJ TOULOUSE. 73 

and "in the midst of sucli heats that the oldest French- 
man never remembers the like," the party set off by way 
of Lyons and Montpellier for their Pyrenean destination. 
Their journey seems to have been a journey of many mis- 
chances, extraordinary discomfort, and incredible length; 
and it is not till the second week in August that we again 
take up the broken thread of his correspondence. Writ- 
ing to Mr. Foley, his banker in Paris, on the 14th of that 
month, he speaks of its having taken him three weeks to 
reach Toulouse ; and adds that *' in our journey we suffer- 
ed so much from the heats, it gives me pain to remember 
it. I never saw a cloud from Paris to Nismes half as 
broad as a twenty-four sols piece. Good God ! we were 
toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed, carbonaded, on one side 
or other, all the way : and being all done through {assez 
cuits) in the day, we were eat up at night by bugs and 
other unswept-out vermin, the legal inhabitants, if length 
of possession give right, at every inn on the way." A few 
miles from Beaucaire he broke a hind wheel of his car- 
riage, and was obliged in consequence " to sit five hours 
on a gravelly road without one drop of water, or possibili- 
ty of getting any ;" and here, to mend the matter, he was 
cursed with '' two dough - hearted fools " for postilions, 
who "fell a-crying * nothing was to be done!'" and could 
only be recalled to a worthier and more helpful mood by 
Sterne's " pulling off his coat and waistcoat," and " threat- 
ening to thrash them both within an inch of their lives." 

The longest journey, however, must come to an end ; 
and the party found much to console them at Toulouse for 
the miseries of travel. They were fortunate enough to se- 
cure one of those large, old comfortable houses which w^ere 
and, here and there, perhaps, still are to be hired on the 
outskirts of provincial towns, at a rent which would now 
F 4^ 



74 STERNE. [chap. t. 

be thought absurdly small ; and Sterne writes in terms of 
high complacency of his temporary abode. " Excellent," 
" well furnished," ** elegant beyond anything I ever looked 
for," are some of the expressions of praise which it draws 
from him. He observes with pride that the " very great 
salle a compagnie is as large as Baron d'Holbach's ;" and 
he records with great satisfaction — as well he might — that 
for the use of this and a country house two miles out of 
town, '* besides the enjoyment of gardens, which the land- 
lord engaged to keep in order," he was to pay no more 
than thirty pounds a year. '* All things," he adds, " are 
cheap in proportion : so we shall live here for a very, very 
little." 

And this, no doubt, was to Sterne a matter of some mo- 
ment at this time. The expenses of his long and tedious 
journey must have been heavy ; and the gold-yielding vein 
of literary popularity, which he had for three years been 
working, had already begun to show signs of exhaustion. 
Tristram Shandy had lost its first vogue ; and the fifth 
and sixth volumes, the copyright of which he does not 
!seem to have disposed of, were ''going off" but slowly. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LIFE IN THE SOUTH. RETURN TO ENGLAND. VOLS. VH. 

AND Vin. SECOND SET OF SERMONS. 

(1762-1765.) 

The diminished appetite of the public for the humours of 
Mr. Shandy and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult 
to understand. Time was simply doing its usual whole- 
some work in sifting the false from the true — in ridding 
Sterne's audience of its contingent of sham admirers. This 
is not to say, of course, that there might not have been 
other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popu- 
lar favour. A writer who systematically employs Sterne's 
peculiar methods must lay his account with undeserved 
loss as well as with unmerited gain. The fifth and sixth 
volumes deal quite largely enough in mere eccentricity to 
justify the distaste of any reader upon whom mere eccen- 
tricity had begun to pall. But if this were the sole ex- 
planation of the book's declining popularity, we should 
have to admit that the adverse judgment of the public had 
been delayed too long for justice, and had passed over the 
worst to light upon the less heinous offences. For the 
third volume, though its earlier pages contain some good 
touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equivoque in 
its concluding chapters ; and the fifth and sixth volumes 
may, at any rate, quite safely challenge fav(5urable €ompar- 



/ 



76 STERNE. [chap. 

ison with the fourth — the poorest, I venture to think, of 
the whole series. There is nothing in these two later vol- 
umes to compare, for instance, with that most wearisome 
exercise in double entendre^ Slawkenbergius's Tale ; nothing 
to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the 
consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatori- 
us's mishap with the hot chestnut ; no such persistent re- 
sort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-mak- 
ing upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the 
fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour of 
the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dra- 
matic order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual 
incongruities in the persons of the two brothers Shandy 
gives animation to the volume almost from beginning to 
end. The arri-val of the news of Bobby Shandy's death, 
and the contrast of its reception by the philosophic father 
and the simple-minded uncle, form a scene of inimitable 
absurdity, and the *' Tristrapsedia," with its ingenious proj- 
ect for opening up innumerable "" tracks of inquiry " be- 
fore the mind of the pupil by sheer skill in the manipula- 
tion of the auxiliary verbs, is in the author's happiest vein. 
The sixth volume, again, which contains the irresistible 
dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great ques- 
tion of the "breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, 
if not wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is ful- 
ly entitled to rank beside -its predecessors. On the whole, 
therefore, it must be said that the colder reception accorded 
to this instalment of the novel, as compared with the pre 
vious one, can hardly be justified on sound critical grounds. 
But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact, the cause 
of Tristram's declining popularity may be confidently in- 
ferred from the fact that the seventh volume, with its ad- 
mirably vivid antl spirited scenes of Continental travel, and 



vl] life in the south. in 

the eighth and ninth, with their charming narrative of Cap- 
'tain Shandy's love affair, were but slightly more successfuL 
The readers whom this, the third instalment of the novel, 
had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine, those who had 
never felt any intelligent admiration for the former; who 
had been caught by the writer's eccentricity, without ap- 
preciating his insight into character and his graphic power, 
and who had seen no other aspects of his humour than 
those buffooneries and puerilities which, after first amusing, 
had begun, in the natural course of things, to weary them. 
Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the 
Southern warmth to that buoyancy which' never long de- 
serted them, Sterne had begun to set to work upon a 
new volume. His letters show that this was not the 
seventh but the eighth ; and Mr. Fitzgerald's conjecture^ 
that the materials ultimately given to the world in the for- 
mer volume were originally designed for another work, 
appears exceedingly probable. But for some time after 
his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it would seem, to 
resume his literary labours in any form. Ever liable, 
through his weakly constitution, to whatever local mala- 
dies might anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to 
Hall Stevenson, *' of an epidemic vile fever which killed 
hundreds about me. The physicians here," he adds, "are 
the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most ignorant of 
all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out 
of their hands, and recommended mv affairs entirely to 
Dame Nature. She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty 
different pinching bouts, and I begin to have a kind of 
enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so iliat one or 
tvvp more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you 
all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having 
nu^v become " stout and foolish again as a man can wish 



18 STERNE. [chap. 

to be, I am," he says, " busy playing the fool with my 
Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over head and ears 
in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that the 
Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Cap- 
tain Shandy's ingenuous heart ; while the seventh volume 
is mainly composed of that series of travel-pictures in 
which Sterne has manifestly recorded his own impressions 
of Northern France in the person of the youthful Tristram. 
It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these sketches, 
and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that 
he refers to, when speaking in this letter of ** hints and 
projects for other works." Originally intended to form a 
part of the volume afterwards published as the Sentimental 
Journey, it was found necessary — under pressure, it is to be 
supposed, of insufficient matter — to work them up instead 
into an interpolated seventh volume of Tristram Shandy, 
At the moment, however, he no doubt as little foresaw this 
as he did the delay which was to take place before any 
continuation of the novel appeared. He clearly contem- 
plated no very long absence from England. " When I 
have reaped the benefit of the winter at Toulouse, I cannot 
see I have anything more to do with it. Therefore, after 
having gone with my wife and girl to Bagneres, I shall 
return from whence I came." Already, however, one can 
perceive signs of his having too presumptuously marked 
out his future. " My wife wants to stay another year, to 
save money ; and this opposition of wishes, though it will 
not be as sour as lemon, yet 'twill not be as sweet as 
sugar." And again : " If the snows will suffer me, I pro- 
pose to spend two or three months at Barege or Bagneres ; 
but my dear wife is against all schemes of additional ex- 
pense, which wicked propensity (though not of despotic 
power) yet I cannot suffer — though, by-the-bye, laudable 



VI.] LIFE IN THE SOUTH. 79 

enough. But she may talk ; I will go ray own way, and 
she will acquiesce without a word of debate on the sub- 
ject. Who can say so much in praise of his wife? Few, 
I trow." The tone of contemptuous amiability shows 
pretty clearly that the relations between husband and wife 
had in nowise improved. But wives do not always lose 
all their influence over husbands' wills along with the 
power over their affections ; and it will be seen that Sterne 
did not make his projected winter trip to Bagneres, and 
that he did remain at Toulouse for a considerable part of 
the second year for which Mrs. Sterne desired to prolong 
their stay. The place, however, was not to his taste ; and 
he was not the first traveller in France who, delighted with 
the gaiety of Paris, has been disappointed at finding that 
French provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself 
could require. It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is 
commonly begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the 
cause of his ennui in ** the eternal platitude of the French 
character," with its "little variety and no originality at 
all." " They are very civil," he admits, ** but civility itself 
so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I 
do not mind I shall grow most stupid and sententious." 
With such apprehensions it is not surprising that he should 
have eagerly welcomed any distraction that chance might 
offer, and in December we find him joyfully informing his 
chief correspondent of the period, Mr. Foley — who to his 
services as Sterne's banker seems to have added those of a 
most helpful and trusted friend — that " there are a com- 
pany of English strollers arrived here who are to act 
comedies all the Christmas, and are now busy in making 
dresses and preparing some of our best comedres." These 
so-called strollers were, in fact, certain members of the 
English colony in Toulouse, and their performances were 



80 STERNE. [chap. 

among the first of those " amateur theatrical " entertain- 
ments which now-a-days may be said to rival the famous 
"morning drum-beat" of Daniel Webster's oration, in 
marking the ubiquity of British boredom, as the reveil 
does that of British power over all the terrestrial globe. 
" The next week," writes Sterne, " with a grand orchestra, 
we play The Busybody, and the Journey to London the 
week after ; but I have some thought of adapting it to 
our situation, and making it the Journey to Toulouse, 
which, with the change of half-a-dozen scenes, may be 
easily done. Thus, my dear Foley, for want of something 
better we have recourse to ourselves, and strike out the 
best amusements we can from such materials." " Re- 
course to ourselves," however, means, in strict accuracy, 
" recourse to each other ;" and when the amateur players 
had played themselves out, and exhausted their powers of 
contributing to each others' amusement, it is probable that 
" recourse to ourselves," in the exact sense of the phrase, 
was found ineffective — in Sterne's case, at any rate — to 
stave off ennui. To him, with his copiously if somewhat 
oddly furnished mind, and his natural activity of imagi- 
nation, one could hardly apply the line of Persius, 

"Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex;" 

but it is yet evident enough that Sterne's was one of that 
numerous order of intellects which are the convivial as- 
sociates, rather than the fireside companions, of their own- 
ers, and which, when deprived of the stimulus of external 
excitement, are apt to become very dull company indeed. 
Nor does he seem to have obtained much diversion of 
mind from his literary work — a form of intellectual en- 
joyment which, indeed, more often presupposes than be- 
gets good spirits in such temperament*s as his. He de- 



VI.] LIFE IN THE SOUTH. 81 

clares, it is true, that he " sports much with my Uncle 
Toby " in the volume which he is now " fabricating for 
the laughing* part of the world ;" but if so he must have 
sported only after a very desultory and dilatory fashion. 
On the whole one cannot escape a very strong impression 
that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn in Toulouse, 
and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to 
"the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife," 
which he had left behind him in the two great capitals in 
which he had shone. 

His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. 
The winter of 1762 went by, and the succeeding year had 
run nearly half its course, before he changed his quarters. 
" The first week in June," he writes in iVpril to Mr. Foley, 
" I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household, to pitch 
our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean 
hills at Bagneres, where I expect much health and much 
amusement from all corners of the earth." He ttilked too 
at this time of spending the winter at Florence, and, after 
a visit to Leghorn, returning home the following April by 
way of Paris; "but this," he «- adds, "is a sketch only," 
and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, however, he 
was in any case resolved to quit. He should not, he said, 
be tempted to spend another winter there. It did not suit 
his health, as he had hoped : he complamed that it was too 
moist, and that he could not keep clear of ague. In June, 
1763, he quitted it finally for Bagneres; whence after a 
short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, so- 
journ, he passed on to Marseilles, and later to Aix, for 
both of which places he expressed dislike ; and by Octo- 
ber he had gone again into winter quarters at Montpellier, 
where " my wife and daughter," he writes, " purpose to 
stay at least a year behind me." His own intention was 



82 STERNE. [chap. 

to set out in February for England, " where my heart has 
been fled these six months." Here again, however, there 
are traces of that periodic, or rather, perhaps, that chronic 
conflict of inclination between himself and Mrs. Sterne, of 
which he speaks with such a tell-tale affectation of philos- 
ophy. " My wife," he writes in January, " returns to Tou- 
louse, and proposes to spend the summer at Bagneres. I, 
on the contrary, go to visit my wife the church in York- 
shire. We all live the longer, at least the happier, for 
having things our own way. This is my conjugal maxim. 
I own 'tis not the best of maxims, but I maintain 'tis not 
the worst." It was natural enough that Sterne, at any rate, 
should wish to turn his back on Montpellier. Again had 
the unlucky invalid been attacked by a dangerous illness ; 
the "sharp air" of the place disagreed with him, and his 
physicians, after having him under their hands more than 
a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed any longer 
in Montpellier it would be fatal to him. How soon after 
that somewhat late warning he took his departure there 
is no record to show; but it is not till the middle of May 
that we find him writing from Paris to his daughter. And 
since he there announces his intention of leaving for Eng- 
land in a few days, it is a probable conjecture that he had 
arrived at the French capital some fortnight or so before. 
His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents — 
trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the man to 
be omitted. Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, had 
just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and Sterne was 
asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel. The mes- 
sage w'as brought him, he writes, " when I was playing a 
sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill ; and w^hether I 
was called abruptly from my afternoon amusement to pre- 
pare myself for the business on the next day, or from what 



VI.] LIFE IN THE SOUTH. 83 

other cause, I do not pretend to determine ; but that un- 
lucky kind of fit seized me which you know I am never 
able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my 
head." The text referred to was 2 Kings xx. 15 — Heze- 
kiah's admission of that ostentatious display of the treas- 
ures of his palace to the ambassadors of Babylon for which 
Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the Babylonian cap- 
tivity of Judah. Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests, could 
have been more innocent than the discourse which he 
founded upon the mal-a-propos text; but still it was un- 
questionably a fair subject for " chaff," and the preacher 
was rallied upon it by no less a person than David Hume. 
Gossip having magnified this into a dispute between the 
pareon and the philosopher, Sterne disposes of the idle 
story in a passage deriving an additional interest from its 
tribute to that sweet disposition which had an equal charm 
for two men so utterly unlike as the author of Tristram 
Shandy and the author of the Wealth of Nations. " I 
should," he writes, " be exceedingly surprised to hear that 
David ever had an unpleasant contention with any man ; 
and if I should ever be made to believe that such an event 
had happened, nothing would persuade me that his oppo- 
nent was not in the wrong, for in my life did I never meet 
with a being of a more placid and gentle nature ; and it is 
this amiable turn of his character which has given more 
consequence and force to his scepticism than all the argu- 
ments of his sophistry." The real truth of the matter 
was that, meeting Sterne at Lord Hertford's table on the 
day when he had preached at the Embassy Chapel, " David 
was disposed to make a little merry with the parson, and 
in return the parson was equally disposed to make a little 
merry with the infidel. We laughed at one another, and 
the company laughed with us both." It would be absurd, 



84 STERNE. [chak 

of course, to identify Sterne's latitudinarian bonhomie with 
the higher order of tolerance ; but many a more confirmed 
and notorious Gallio than the clerical humourist would 
have assumed prudish airs of orthodoxy in such a pres- 
ence, and the incident, if it does not raise one's estimate 
of Sterne's dignity, displays him to us as laudably free 
from hypocrisy. 

But the long. holiday of somewhat dull travel, with its 
short last act of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In 
the third or fourth week of May Sterne quitted Paris ; and 
after a stay of a few weeks in London he returned to the 
Yorkshire parsonage, from which he had been absent some 
thirty months. 

Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed 
since the publication of the last instalment of Tristram 
Shandy^ the new one w^as far from ready ; and even in 
the "sweet retirement" of Coxwold he seems to have 
made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the " sweet re- 
tirement " itself became soon a little tedious to him. The 
month of September found him already bored with work 
and solitude; and the fine autumn weather of 1764 set 
him longing for a few days' pleasure-making at what was 
even then the fashionable Yorkshire watering-place. " I 
do not think," he writes, w^ith characteristic incoherence, 
to Hall Stevenson — "I do not think a week or ten days' 
playing the good fellow (at this very time) so abominable 
a thing ; but if a man could get there cleverly, and every 
soul in his house in the mind to try what could be done 
in furtherance thereof, I have no one to consult in these 
affairs. Therefore, as a man may do worse things, the 
plain English of all which is, that I am going to leave a 
few poor sheep in. the wilderness for fourteen days, and 
from pride and naughtiness of heart to go see what is 



VI.] RETURN TO ENGLAND. 85 

doing at Scarborough, steadfully meaning afterwards to 
lead a new life and strengthen my faith. Now, some folks 
say there is much company there, and some say not ; and 
I believe there is neither the one nor the other, but will be 
both if the world will have patience for a month or so." 
Of his work he has not much to say: "I go on not rap- 
idly but well enough with my Uncle Toby's amours. 
There is no sitting and cudgelling one's brains whilst the 
sun shines brio-ht. 'Twill be all over in six or seven 
weeks ; and there are dismal weeks enow after to endure 
suffocation by a brimstone fireside." He was anxious that 
his boon companion should join him at Scarborough ; but 
that additional pleasure was denied him, and he had to 
content himself with the usual gay society of the place. 
Three weeks, it seems, were passed by him in this most 
doubtfully judicious form of bodily and mental relaxation 
— weeks which he spent, he afterwards writes, in " drinking 
the waters, and receiving from them marvellous strength, 
had I not debilitated it as fast as I got it by playing the 
good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much." By 
the end of the month he was back again at Coxwold, 
■■ returned to my Philosophical Hut to finish Tristram^ 
which I calculate will be ready for the world about Christ- 
mas, at which time I decamp from hence and fix my head- 
quarters at London for the winter, unless ray cough pushes 
me forward to your metropolis" (he is writing to Foley, 
in Paris), " or that I can persuade some gros milord to 
make a trip to you." Again, too, in this letter we get 
another glimpse at that thoroughly desentimentalized 
*' domestic interior" which the sentimentalist's household 
had long presented to the view. Writing to request a 
remittance of money to Mrs. Sterne at Montauban — a duty 
which, to do hi in justice, he seeras to have very watchfully 



86 STERNE. [chap. 

observed — Sterne adds his solicitation to Mr. Foley to " do 
something equally essential to rectify a mistake in the 
mind of your correspondent there, who, it seems, gave her 
a hint not long ago ' that she was separated from me for 
life.' Now, as this is not true, in the first place, and may 
fix a disadvantageous impression of her to those she lives 
amongst, 'twould be unmerciful to let her or my daughter 
suffer by it. So do be so good as to undeceive him ; for 
in a year or two she purposes (and I expect it with impa- 
tience from her) to rejoin me." 

Early in November the two new volumes of Shandy be- 
gan to approach completion ; for by this time Sterne had 
already made up his mind to interpolate these notes of his 
French travels, which now do duty as Vol. VII. " You 
will read," he tells Foley, *' as odd a tour through France 
as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel- 
writer since the world began. 'Tis a laughing, good-tem- 
pered satire upon travelling — as puppies travel." By the 
16th of the month he had "finished my two volumes 
of Tristram^^'* and looked to be in London at Christmas, 
" whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year. 
At least I shall not defer it above another." On the 26th 
of January, 1765, the two new volumes were given to the 
world. 

Shorter in length than any of the preceding instalments, 
and filled out as it was, even so, by a process of what 
would now be called ** book-making," this issue will yet 
bear comparison, I think, with the best of its predecessors. 
Its sketches of travel, though destined to be surpassed in 
vigour and freedom of draftsmanship by the Sentimental 
Journey, are yet excellent, and their very obvious want of 
connexion with the story — if story it can be called — is so 
little felt that we almost resent the head-and-ears introdue- 



vi] *' TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. VII. AND VIII. 87 

tion of Mr. Shandy and his brother, and the Corporal, in 
apparent concession to the popular prejudice in favour of 
some sort of coherence between the various parts of a nar- 
rative. The first seventeen chapters are, perhaps, as freshly 
delightful reading as anything in Sterne. They are liter- 
ally filled and brimming over with the exhilaration of 
travel: written, or at least prepared for writing, we can 
clearly see, under the full intoxicant effect which a bewil- 
dering succession of new sights and sounds will produce, 
in a certain measure, upon the coolest of us, and which 
would set a head like Sterne's in an absolute whirl. The 
contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible ; and, 
putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, 
these chapters are, for mere fun — for that kind of clever 
nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and 
which so promptly makes ashamed the moment sponta- 
neity fails — unsurpassed by anything of the same kind 
from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so 
keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true a judg- 
ment in the highest qualities of humour, Sterne should 
think it possible for any one who has outgrown what may 
be called the dirty stage of boyhood to smile at the story 
which begins a few chapters afterwards — that of the 
Abbess and Novice of the Convent of Andouillets ! The 
adult male person is not so much shocked at the coarse- 
ness of this story as astounded at the bathos of its intro- 
duction. It is as though some matchless connoisseur in 
wine, after having a hundred times demonstrated the un- 
erring discrimination of his palate for the finest brands, 
should then produce some vile and loaded compound, and 
invite us to drink it with all the relish with which he 
seems to be swallowing it himself. This story of the Ab- 
bess and Novice almost impels us to turn back to certain 



88 STERNE. [chap. 

earlier chapters, or former volumes, and re-examine some 
of the subtler passages of humour to be found there — in 
downright apprehension lest we should turn out to have 
read these ^'good things," not "in," but "into," our au- 
thor. The bad wine is so very bad, that we catch our- 
selves wondering whether the finer brands were genuine, 
when we see the same palate equally satisfied with both. 
But one should, of course, add that it is only in respect of 
its supposed humour that this story shakes its readers' 
faith in the gifts of the narrator. As a mere piece of 
story-telling, and even as a study in landscape and figure- 
painting, it is quite perversely skilful. There is something 
almost irritating, as a waste of powers on unworthy ma- 
terial, in the prettiness of the picture which Sterne draws 
of the preparations for the departure of the two religieuses 
— the stir in the simple village, the co-operating labours of 
the gardener and the tailor, the carpenter and the smith, 
and all those other little details which bring the whole 
scene before the eye so vividly that Sterne may, perhaps, 
in all seriousness, and not merely as a piece of his charac- 
teristic persiflage, have thrown in the exclamation, " I de- 
clare I am interested in this story, and wish I had been 
there." Nothing, again, could be better done than the 
sketch of the little good-natured, "broad-set" gardener, 
who acted as the ladies' muleteer, and the recital of the 
indiscretions by Avhich he was betrayed into temporary de- 
sertion of his duties. The whole scene is Chaucerian in 
its sharpness of outline and translucency of atmosphere: 
though there, unfortunately, the resemblance ends. Sterne's 
manner of saying what we now leave unsaid is as unlike 
Chaucer's, and as unlike for the worse, as it can pos- 
sibly be. 

Still, a certain amount of this element of the non nomi- 



VI.] "TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. YIL AND YIII. 89 

nandum must be compounded for, one regrets to say, in 
nearly every chapter that Sterne ever wrote ; and there 
is certainly less than the average amount of it in the 
seventh volume. Then, again, this volume contains the 
famous scene with the ass — the live and genuinely touch- 
ing, and not the dead and fictitiously pathetic, animal ; 
and that perfect piece of comic dialogue — the interview 
between the puzzled English traveller and the French com- 
missary of the posts. To have suggested this scene is, per- 
jiaps, the sole claim of the absurd fiscal system of the An- 
cien regime upon the grateful remembrance of the world. 
A scheme of taxation which exacted posting-charges from 
a traveller who proposed to continue his journey by water, 
possesses a natural ingredient of drollery infused into its 
mere vexatiousness ; but a whole volume of satire could 
hardly put its essential absurdity in a stronger light than 
is thrown upon it in the short conversation between the 
astonished Tristram and the ofiicer of the fisc, who had 
just handed him a little bill for six livres four sous : 

*• ' Upon what account V said I. 

" ^ 'Tis upon the part of the King,' said the commissary, heaving 
up his shoulders. 

" *- My good friend,' quoth I, '• as sure as I am I, and you are you — ' 

" * And who are you ?' he said. 

"'Don't puzzle me,' said I. *But it is an indubitable verity,' I 
continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing only the 
form of my asseveration, ' that I owe the King of France nothing but 
my good-will, for he is a very honest man, and I wish him all the health 
and pastime in the world.' 

" ' Pardonnez-moi,' replied the commissary. ' You are indebted to 
him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Pons, on 
your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you pay double for 
the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more 
than three livres two sous.' 

" * But I don't go by land,' said L 
G 5 



/ 



90 STERNE. [chap. 

" * You may if you please,' replied the commissary. 

" * Your most obedient servant/ said I, making him a low bow. 

*' The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good-breeding, 
made me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted by a bow 
in my life. * The devil take the serious character of these people,* 
said I, aside; ^they understand no more of irony than this.' The 
comparison was standing close by with her panniers, but something 
sealed up my lips. I could not pronounce the name. 

" ' Sir,' said I, collecting myself, ' it is not my intention to take 
post.' 

*' ' But you may,' said he, persisting in his first reply. * You may 
if you choose.' 

" 'And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.^ But I 
do not choose.' 

*' ' But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.' 

•' ' Ay, for the salt,' said I, * I know.' 

" * And for the post, too,' added he. 

" * Defend me !' cried I. * I travel by water. I am going down the 
Rhone this very afternoon ; my baggage is in the boat, and I have 
actually paid nine livres for my passage.' 

" ' C'est tout egal — 'tis all one,' said he. 

" * Bon Dieu ! What ! pay for the way I go and for the way I do 
not go ?' 

" ' C'est tout egal,' replied the commissary. 

"'The devil it is !' said I. ' But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles 
first. 0, England ! England ! thou land of Uberty and climate of 
good-sense ! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses !' cried 

* It is the penalty — I suppose the just penalty — paid by habitually 
extravagant humourists, that meaning not being always expected of 
them, it is not always sought by their readers with sufficient care. 
Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of Tristram's is too often 
passed over as a mere random absurdity designed for his interlocu- 
tor's mystification, and that its extremely felicitous pertinence to the 
question in dispute is thus overlooked. The point of it, of course, is 
that the business in which the commissary was then engaged was 
precisely analogous to that of exacting salt dues from perverse per- 
sons who were impoverishing the revenue by possessing herrings al- 
ready pickled. 



VI.] ^* TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. YII. AND VIII. 91 

I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe — when 
the director of Madame L. Blanc's conscience coming in at that in- 
stant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at 
his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church. 

"'I go by water,' said I, 'and here's another will be for making 
me pay for going by oil.' " 

The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tris- 
tram protests that the treatment to which he is being sub- 
jected is " contrary to the law of nature, contrary to rea- 
son, contrary to the Gospel :" 

" 'But not to this,' said he, putting a printed paper into my hand. 

"'De par le Roi.' "Tis a pithy prolegomenon,' quoth I, and so 
read on. . . . • By all which it appears, ' quoth I, having read it over 
a little too rapidly, ' that if a man sets out in a post-chaise for Paris, 
he must go on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay for it.' 

'"Excuse me,' said the commissary, 'the spirit of the ordinance is 
this, that if you set out with an intention of running post from Paris 
to Avignon, &c., you shall not change that intention or mode of trav- 
elling without first satisfying the fermiers for two posts further than 
the place you repent at; and 'tis founded,' continued he, ' upon this, 
that the revenues are not to fall short through your fickleness.' 

" ' 0, by heavens !' cried I, ' if fickleness is taxable in France, we 
have nothing to do but to make the best peace we can.' 

"And so the peace was made." 

And the volume ends with the dance of villagers on 
" the road between Msmes and Lunel, where is the best 
Muscatto wine in all France " — that charming little idyll 
which won the unwilling admiration of the least friendly 
of Sterne's critics.^ 

With the close of this volume the shadowy Tristram 
disappears altogether from the scene ; and even the clear- 
ly-sketched figures of Mr. and Mrs. Shandy recede some- 
what into the background. The courtship of my Uncle 
' Thackeray : English Humourists^ vol. x. p. 568, ed. 1879. 



92 STERNE. [chap. 

Toby forms the whole motifs and indeed almost the entire 
substance, of the next volume. Of this famous episode 
in the novel a great deal has been said and written, and 
much of the praise bestowed upon it is certainly deserved. 
The artful coquetries of the fascinating widow, and the 
gradual capitulation of the Captain, are studied with admi- 
rable power of humorous insight, and described with in- 
finite grace and skill. But there is, perhaps, no episode in 
the novel which brings out what may be called the per- 
versity of Sterne's animalism in a more exasperating way. 
It is not so much the amount of this element as the time, 
place, and manner in which it makes its presence felt. The 
senses must, of course, play their part in all love affairs, ex- 
cept those of the angels — or the triangles ; and such writers 
as Byron, for instance, are quite free from the charge of 
over-spiritualizing their description of the passion. Yet 
one might safely say that there is far less to repel a 
healthy mind in the poet's account of the amour of Juan 
and Haidee than is to be found in many a passage in this 
volume. It is not merely that one is the poetry and the 
other the prose of the sexual passion : the distinction goes 
deeper, and points to a fundamental difference of attitude 
towards their subject in the two waiters' minds. 

The success of this instalment of Tristram Shandy ap- 
pears to have been slightly greater than that of the pre- 
ceding one. Writing from London, where he was once 
more basking in the sunshine of social popularity, to Gar- 
rick, then in Paris, he says (March 16, 1765) : " I have had 
a lucrative campaign here. Shandy sells well," and " I am 
taxing the public with two more volumes of sermons, which 
will more than double the gains of Shandy. It goes into 
the world with a prancing list de toute la noblessey which 
will bring me in three hundred pounds, exclusive of the 



Ti.] " TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. YII. AND VIII. 98 

sale of the copy." The list was, indeed, extensive and dis- 
tinguished enough to justify the curious epithet which he 
applies to it ; but the cavalcade of noble names continued 
to *' prance " for some considerable time without advancing. 
Yet he had good reasons, according to his own account, for 
wishing to push on their publication. His parsonage-house 
at Sutton had just been burnt down through the careless- 
ness of one of his curate's household, with a loss to Sterne 
of some 350/. "As soon as I can," he says, "I must re- 
build it, but I lack the means at present." Nevertheless, 
the new sermons continued to hang fire. Again, in April 
he describes the subscription list as " the most splendid list 
which ever pranced before a book since subscription came 
into fashion ;" but though the volumes which it' was to 
usher into the world were then spoken of as about to be 
printed " very soon," he has again in July to write of them 
only as " forthcoming in September, though I fear not in 
time to bring them with me " to Paris. And, as a matter 
of fact, they do not seem to have made their appearance 
until after Sterne had quitted England on his second and 
last Continental journey. The full subscription list may 
have had the effect of relaxing his energies ; but the sub- 
scribers had no reason to complain when, in 1766, the vol- 
umes at last appeared. 

The reception given to the first batch of sermons which 
Sterne had published was quite favourable enough to en- 
courage a repetition of the experiment. He was shrewd 
enough, however, to perceive that on this second occasion 
a somewhat different sort of article would be required. In 
the first flush of Tristram Shandi/s success, and in the 
first piquancy of the contrast between the grave profession 
of the writer and the unbounded license of the book, he 
could safely reckon on as large and curious a public for any 



94 STERNE. [chap. 

sermons whatever from the pen of Mr. Yorick. There 
was no need that the humourist in his pulpit should at all 
resemble the humourist at his desk, or, indeed, that he 
should be in any way an impressive or commanding figure. 
The great desire of the world was to know what he did 
resemble in this new and incongruous position. Men 
wished to see what the queer, sly face looked like over 
a velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight would be 
a strange and interesting one, at any rate. Five years af- 
terwards, however, the case was different. The public then 
had already had one set of sermons, and had discovered 
that the humorous Mr. Sterne was not a very different man 
in the pulpit from the dullest and most decorous of his 
brethren. Such discoveries as these are instructive to 
make, but not attractive to dwell upon ; and Sterne was 
fully alive to the probability that there would be no great 
demand for a volume of sermons which should only illus- 
trate for the second time the fact that he could be as com- 
monplace as his neighbour. He saw that in future the 
Rev. Mr. Yorick must a little more resemble the author of 
Tristram Shandy^ and it is not improbable that from 1760 
onwards he composed his parochial sermons with especial 
attention to this mode of qualifying them for republication. 
There is, at any rate, no slight critical difficulty in believ- 
ing that the bulk of the sermons of 1766 can be assigned 
to the same literary period as the sermons of 1761. The 
one set seems as manifestly to belong to the post-Shandian 
as the other does to the pre-Shandian era; and in some, 
indeed, of the apparently later productions the daring 
quaintness of style and illustration is carried so far that, 
e-xcept for the fact that Sterne had no time to spare for 
the composition of sermons not intended for professional 
use, one would have been disposed to believe that they 



VI.] SECOND SET OF SERMONS. 95 

neither were nor were meant to be delivered from the pul- 
pit at all/ Throughout all of them, however, Sterne's 
new-found literary power displays itself in a vigour of ex- 
pression and vivacity of illustration which at least serve to 
make the sermons of 1766 considerably more entertain- 
ing reading than those of 1761. In the first of the latter 
series, for instance — the sermon on Shimei — a discourse 
in which there are no very noticeable sallies of unclerical 
humour, the quality of liveliness is very conspicuously 
present. The preacher's view of the character of Shimei, 
and of his behaviour to David, is hardly that, perhaps, of 
a competent historical critic, and in treating of the Ben- 
jamite's insults to the King of Israel he appears to take 
no account of the blood-feud between the house of David 
and the clan to which the railer belouged ; just as in com- 
menting on Shimei's subsequent and most abject submis- 
sion to the victorious monarch, Sterne lays altogether too 
much stress upon conduct which is indicative, not so much 
of any exceptional meanness of disposition, as of the or- 
dinary suppleness of the Oriental put in fear of his life. 
However, it makes a more piquant and dramatic picture to 
represent Shimei as a type of the wretch of insolence and 
servility compact, with a tongue ever ready to be loosed 
against the unfortunate, and a knee ever ready to be bent 
to the strong. And thus he moralizes on his conception : 

" There is not a character in the world which has so bad an influ- 
ence upon it as this of Shimei. While power meets with honest 
checks, and the evils of life with honest refuge, the world will never 
be undone ; but thou, Shimei, hast sapped it at both extremes : for 
thou corruptest prosperity, and 'tis thou who hast broken the heart 

^ Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed, asserts as a fact that some at least of 
these sermons were actually composed in the capacity of litterateur 
and not of divine — for the press and not for the pulpit. 



96 STERNE. [chap. 

of poverty. And so long as worthless spirits can be ambitious ones 
'tis a character we never shall want. Oh ! it infests the court, the 
camp, the cabinet ; it infests the Church. Go where you will, in 
every quarter, in every profession, you see a Shimei following the 
wheels of the fortunate through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei, 
haste ! or thou wilt be undone forever. Shimei girdeth up his loins 
and speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything 
takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth on 
heavily. Shimei doubles his speed ; but 'tis the contrary way : he flies 
like the wind over a sandy desert. . . . Stay, Shimei ! 'tis your patron, 
your friend, your benefactor, the man who has saved you from the 
dunghill. 'Tis all one to Shimei. Shimei is the barometer of every 
man's fortune ; marks the rise and fall of it, with all the variations 
from scorching hot to freezing cold upon his countenance that the 
simile will admit of.^ Is a cloud upon thy affairs? See, it hangs 
over Shimei's brow ! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the 
captain of the host without success ? Look not into the Court Cal- 
endar, the vacancy is filled in Shimei's face. Art thou in debt, though 
not to Shimei ? No matter. The worst ofiicer of the law shall not 
be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the fault of poverty so 
black? is it of so general concern that thou and all thy family must 
rise up as one man to reproach it ? When it lost everything, did it 
lose the right to pity too ? Or did he who maketh poor as well as 
maketh rich strip it of its natural powers to mollify the heart and 
supple the temper of your race ? Trust me you have much to an- 
swer for. It is this treatment which it has ever met with from spir- 
its like yours which has gradually taught the world to look upon it 
as the greatest of evils, and shun it as the worst disgrace. And what 
is it, I beseech you — what is it that men will not do to keep clear of 
so sore an imputation and punishment ? Is it not to fly from this 
that he rises early, late takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness ? 
that he plots, contrives, swears, lies, shuffles, puts on all shapes, tries 
all garments, wears them with this or that side outward, just as it 
may favour his escape ?" 

And though the sermon ends in orthodox fashion, with 
an assurance that, in spite of the Shimeis by whom we 

^ Which are not many in the case of a barometer. 



Ti.] SECOND SET OF SERMOXS. 9*7 

are surrounded, it is in our power to '' lay the foundation 
of our peace (where it ought to be) w-ithin our own 
hearts," yet the preacher can, in the midst of his earlier 
reflections, permit himself the quaintly pessimistic out- 
burst : " O Shimei ! would to Heaven, when thou wast 
slain, that all thy family had been slain with thee, and 
not one of thy resemblance left! But ye have multiplied 
exceedingly, and replenished the earth ; and if I prophesy 
rightly, ye will in the end subdue it." 

Nowhere, however, does the man of the world reveal 
himself with more strangely comical effect under the 
gown of the divine than in the sermon on " The Prod- 
igal Son." The repentant spendthrift has returned to 
his father's house, and is about to confess his follies. 
But— 

"Alas ! How shall he tell his story ? 

" Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall give 
in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and folly: the 
feasts and banquets which he gave to whole cities in the East ; the 
costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks to dress them ; the ex- 
penses of singing men and singing women ; the flute, the harp, the 
sackbut, and all kinds of music ; the dress of the Persian Court how 
magnificent ! their slaves how numerous ! their chariots, their homes, 
their pictures, their furniture, what immense sums they had devour- 
ed ! what expectations from strangers of condition ! what exactions ! 
How shall the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheat- 
ed at Damascus by one of the best men in the world ; that he had 
lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off 
with it to the Ganges ; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his 
best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead ; that 
he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver to 
a worker in graven images ; that the images he had purchased pro- 
duced him nothing, that they could not be transported across the 
wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan ; that the apes 
and peacocks which he had sent for from Tharsis lay dead upon his 
5* 



98 STERNE. [chap. 

hands ; that the mummies had not been dead long enough which he 
had brought from Egypt ; that all had gone wrong from the day he 
forsook his father's house ?" 

All this, it must be admitted, is pretty lively for a ser- 
mon. But hear the reverend gentleman once more, in the 
same discourse, and observe the characteristic coolness 
with which he touches, only to drop, what may be called 
the " professional " moral of the parable, and glides off 
into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflec- 
tions, suggested — or rather, supposed in courtesy to have 
been suggested — by the text. *' I know not," he says, 
*' whether it would be a subject of much edification to con- 
vince you here that our Saviour, by the Prodigal Son, par- 
ticularly pointed out those who were sinners of the Gen- 
tiles, and were recovered by divine grace to repentance ; 
and that by the elder brother he intended manifestly the 
more froward of the Jews," &c. But, whether it would 
edify you or not, he goes on, in effect, to say, I do not 
propose to provide you with edification in that kind. 
" These uses have been so ably set forth in so many good 
sermons upon the Prodigal Son that I shall turn aside 
from them at present, and content myself with some re- 
flections upon that fatal passion which led him — and so 
many thousands after the example — to gather all he had 
together and take his journey into a far country." In 
other words, ** I propose to make the parable a peg whereon 
to hang a few observations on (what does the reader sup- 
pose ?) the practice of sending young men upon the Grand 
Tour, accompanied by a ' bear-leader,' and herein of the 
various kinds of bear-leaders, and the services which they 
do, and do not, render to their charges ; with a few words 
on society in Continental cities, and a true view of ' letters 
of introduction.' " That is literally the substance of the 



vi.J SECOND SET OF SERMONS. 99 

remainder of the sermon. And thus pleasantly does the 
preacher play with his curious subject : 

" But you will send an able pilot with your son — a scholar. If 
wisdom can speak in no other tongue but Greek or Latin, you do 
well; or if mathematics will make a man a gentleman, or natural' 
philosophy but teach him to make a bow, he may be of some service 
in introducing your son into good societies, and supporting him in 
them when he had done. But the upshot will be generally this, that 
on the most pressing occasions of addresses, if he is not a mere man 
of reading, the unhappy youth will have the tutor to carry, and not 
the tutor to carry him. But (let us say) you will avoid this extreme ; 
he shall be escorted by one who knows the world, not only from 
books but from his own experience; a man who has been employed 
on such services, and thrice ' made the tour of Europe with success ' 
— that is, without breaking his own or his pupil's neck ; for if he is 
such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss valet de chambre^ some 
general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months, 
* if God permit,' much knowledge will not accrue. Some profit, at 
least : he will learn the amount to a halfpenny of every stage from 
Calais to Rome ; he will be carried to the best inns, instructed where 
there is the best wine, and sup a livre cheaper than if the youth had 
been left to make the tour and the bargain himself. Look at our 
governor, I beseech you ! See, he is an inch taller as he relates the 
advantages. And here endeth his pride, his knowledge, and his use. 
But when your son gets abroad he will be taken out of his hand by 
his society with men of rank and letters, with whom he will pass the 
greatest part of his time." 

So much for the bear-leader ; and now a remark or two 
on the young man's chances of getting into good foreign 
society ; and then — the benediction : 

"Let me observe, in the first place, that company which is really 
good is very rare and very shy. But you have surmounted this dif- 
ficulty, and procured him the best letters of recommendation to the 
most eminent and respectable in every capital. And I answer that 
he will obtain all by them which courtesy strictly stands obliged to 



100 STERNE. [chap. 

pay on such occasions, but no more. There is nothing in which we 
are so much deceived as in the advantages proposed from our con- 
nexions and discourse with the Uterati, &c., in foreign parts, espe- 
cially if the experiment is made before we are matured by years or 
study. Conversation is a traffic ; and if you enter it without some 
stock of knowledge to balance the account perpetually betwixt you, 
the trade drops at once ; and this is the reason, however it may be 
boasted to the contrary, why travellers have so little (especially good) 
conversation with the natives, owing to their suspicion, or perhaps 
conviction, that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversa- 
tion of young itinerants worth the trouble of their bad language, or 
the interruption of their visits.'* 

Very true, no doubt, and excellently well put; but we 
seem to have got some distance, in spirit at any rate, from 
Luke XV. 13; and it is with somewhat too visible effect, 
perhaps, that Sterne forces his way back into the ortho- 
dox routes of pulpit disquisition. The youth, disappoint- 
ed with his reception by " the literati," &c., seeks '* an 
easier society ; and as bad company is always ready, and 
ever lying in wait, the career is soon finished, and the 
poor prodigal returns — the same object of pity with the 
prodigal in the Gospel." Hardly a good enough " tag," 
perhaps, to reconcile the ear to the "And now to," &c., 
as a fitting close to this pointed little essay in the style of 
the Chesterfield Letters. There is much internal evidence 
to show that this so-called sermon was written either after 
Sterne's visit to or during his stay in France ; and there 
is strong reason, I think, to suppose that it was in reality 
neither intended for a sermon nor actually delivered from 
the pulpit. 

No other of his sermons has quite so much vivacity as 
this. But in the famous discourse upon an unlucky text 
— the sermon preached at the chapel of the English Em- 
bassy, in Paris — there are touches of unclerical raillery not 



VI.] SECOND SET OF SERMONS. 101 

a few. Thus : " What a noise," he exclaims, " among the 
simulants of the various virtues! . . . Behold Humility, 
become so out of mere pride; Chastity, never once in 
harm's way ; and Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an 
Italian stage — a bladder full of wind. Hush ! the sound 
of that trumpet ! Let not my soldier run !' tis some good 
Christian giving alms. O Pity, thou gentlest of human 
passions! soft and tender are thy notes, and ill accord 
they with so loud an instrument." 

Here, again, is a somewhat bold saying for a divine : 
" But, to avoid all commonplace cant as much as I can on 
this head, I will forbear to say, because I do not think, 
that 'tis a breach of Christian charity to think or speak 
ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our opinion 
must follow the evidence," &c. And a little later on, 
commenting on the insinuation conveyed in Satan's ques- 
tion, " Does Job serve God for nought ?" he says : " It is 
a bad picture, and done by a terrible master ; and yet we 
are always copying it. Does a man from real conviction 
of heart forsake his vices ? The position is not to be al- 
lowedo No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure 
virgin fear God, and say her prayers? She is in her cli- 
macteric ? Does humility clothe and educate the unknown 
orphan ? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies. See ! is he 
not the father of the child ?" In another sermon he 
launches out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a 
religious movement which he was certainly the last person 
in the world to understand — to wit, Methodism. He asks 
whether, '* when a poor, disconsolated, drooping creature 
is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without ceasing till 
his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes 
till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind, it is a won- 
der that the mechanical disturbances and conflicts of an 



102 STERNE. [chap. vi. 

empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mis- 
took for workings of a different kind from what they 
are?" Other sermons reflect the singularly bitter anti- 
Catholic feeling which was characteristic even of indiffer- 
entism in those days — at any rate amongst Whig divines. 
But in most of them one is liable to come at any moment 
across one of those strange sallies to which Gray alluded, 
when he said of the effect of Sterne's sermons upon a 
reader that " you often see him tottering on the verge of 
laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of 
the audience." 



CHAPTER VII. 

FRANCE AND ITALY. MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER. 

RETURN TO ENGLAND. " TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOL. IX. 

" THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY." 

(1765-1768.) 

In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, 
Sterne set out on what was afterwards to become famous 
as the " Sentimental Journey through France and Italy." 
Not, of course, that all the materials for that celebrated 
piece of literary travel were collected on this occasion. 
From London as far as Lyons his way lay by a route 
which he had already traversed three years before, and 
there is reason to believe that at least some of the scenes 
in the Sentimental Journey were drawn from observation 
made on his former visit. His stay in Paris was shorter 
this year than it had been on the previous occasion. A 
month after leaving England he was at Pont Beauvoisin, 
and by the middle of JSTovember he had reached Turin. 
From this city he writes, with his characteristic simplici- 
ty : "I am very happy, and have found my way into a 
dozen houses already. To-morrow I am to be presented 
to the King, and when that ceremony is over I shall have 
ray hands full of engagements." From Turin he went on, 
by way of Milan, Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna, to Flor- 
ence, where, after three days' stay, " to dine with our 
Plenipo.," he continued his journey to Rome. Here, and 



104 STERNE. [chap. 

at Naples, he passed the winter of l765-'66/ and pro- 
longed his stay in Italy until the ensuing spring was well 
advanced. In the month of May he was again on his way 
home, through France, and had had a meeting, after two 
years' separation from them, with his wife and daughter. 
His account of it to Hall Stevenson is curious : ** Never 
man," he writes, "^has been such a wild-goose chase after 
his wife as I have been. After having sought her in five or 
six different towns, I found her at last in Franche Comte. 
Poor woman !" he adds, " she was very cordial, &c." The 
&c. is charming. But her cordiality had evidently no ten- 
dency to deepen into any more impassioned sentiment, for 
she '' begged to stay another year or so." As to " my 
Lydia" — the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne's hav- 
ing turned out of his road — she, he says, "pleases me much. 
I found her greatly improved in everything I wished her." 
As to himself: *'I am most unaccountably well, and most 
accountably nonsensical. 'Tis at least a proof of good 
spirits, which is a sign and token, in these latter days, that 
I must take up my pen. In faith, I think I shall die with 
it in my hand ; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony, 
notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most 
melancholy on that account." The " fears " and the mel- 
ancholy were, alas ! to be justified, rather than the " good 
spirits ;" and the shears of Atropos were to close, not in 
ten years, but in little more than twenty months, upon 
that fragile thread of life, 

^ It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French valet La- 
fleur, whom he introduced as a character into the Sentimental Jour- 
ney^ but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour (if, 
indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from which 
Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed out, 
from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious. 



VII.] "TRISTKAM SHANDY," VOL. IX. 105 

By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire 
home, and very soon after had settled down to work upon 
the ninth and last volume of Tristram Shandy, He was 
writing, however, as it should seem, under something more 
than the usual distractions of a man with two establish- 
ments. Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her 
husband — who, to do him justice, was always properly so- 
licitous for her material comfort — w^as busy making pro- 
vision for her to change her quarters to Chalons. He 
writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending fifty pounds, and 
begging him to make her all further advances that might 
be necessary. ** I have," he says, " such entire confidence 
in my wife that she spends as little as she can, though she 
is confined to no particular sum . . . and you may rely — 
in case she should draw for fifty or a hundred pounds ex- 
traordinary — that it and every demand shall be punctually 
paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole 
Shandian family are ready to stand security." Later on, 
too, he writes that *' a young nobleman is now inaugurat- 
ing a jaunt with me for six weeks, about Christmas, to the 
Faubourg St. Germain ;" and he adds — in a tone the sin- 
cerity of which he would himself have probably found a 
difiiculty in gauging — ** if my wife should grow worse 
(having had a very poor account of her in my daughter's 
last), I cannot think of her being without me ; and, how- 
ever expensive the journey would be, I would fly to Avign- 
on to administer consolation to her and my poor girl."^ 

^ There can be few admirers of Sterne's genius who would not 
gladly incline, whenever they find it possible, to Mr. Fitzgerald's very 
indulgent estimate of his disposition. But this is only one of many 
instances in which the charity of the biographer appears to me to 
be, if the expression may be permitted, unconscionable. I can, at 
any rate, find no warrant whatever in the above passage for the too 
H 



106 STERNE. [chap. 

The necessity for this flight, however, did not arise. Bet- 
ter accounts of Mrs. Sterne arrived a few weeks later, and 
the husband's consolations were not required. 

Meanwhile the idyll of Captain Shandy's love-making 
was gradually approaching completion ; and there are signs 
to be met with — in the author's correspondence, that is to 
say, and not in the work itself — that he was somewhat im- 
patient to be done with it, at any rate for the time. " I 
shall publish," he says, " late in this year ; and the next I 
shall begin a new work of four volumes, which, when fin- 
ished, I shall continue Tristram with fresh spirit." The 
new work in four volumes (not destined to get beyond 
one) was, of course, the Sentimental Journey. His ninth 
volume of Tristram Shandy was finished by the end 
of the year, and at Christmas he came up to London, after 
his usual practice, to see to its publication and enjoy 
the honours of its reception. The book passed duly 
through the press, and in the last days of January was 
issued the announcement of its immediate appearance. 
Of the character of its welcome I can find no other ev- 
idence than that of Sterne himself, in a letter addressed 
to M. Panchaud some fortnight after the book appeared. 
" 'Tis liked the best of all here ;" but, with whatever ac- 
curacy this may have expressed the complimentary opin- 
ion of friends, or even the well-considered judgment of 
critics, one can hardly believe that it enjoyed anything 
like the vogue of the former volumes. Sterne, however, 
would be the less concerned for this, that his head was at 
the moment full of his new venture. " I am going," he 

kindly suggestion that "Sterne was actually negotiating a journey to 
Paris as ' bear-leader ' to a young nobleman (an odious office, to which 
he had special aversion), in order that he might with economy fly 
over to Avignon." 



viT.] *'THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY;' lOY 

writes, " to publish A Sentimental Journey through France 
and Italy, The undertaking is protected and highly en- 
couraged by all our noblesse. 'Tis subscribed for at a 
great rate ; 'twill be an original, in large quarto, the sub- 
scription half a guinea. If you (Panchaud) can procure 
me the honour of a few names of men of science or 
fashion, I shall thank you : they will appear in good com- 
pany, as all the nobility here have honoured me with their 
names." As was usual with him, however, he postponed 
commencing it until he should have returned to Coxwold ; 
and, as was equally usual with him, he found it diflBcult to 
tear himself away from the delights of London. More- 
over, there was in the present instance a special difficulty, 
arising out of an affair upon which, as it has relations with 
the history of Sterne's literary work, it would be impossi- 
ble, even in the most strictly critical and least general of 
biographies, to observe complete silence. I refer, of course, 
to the famous and furious flirtation with Mrs. Draper — 
the Eliza of the Yorick and Eliza Letters. Of the affair 
itself but little need be said. I have already stated my 
own views on the general subject of Sterne's love affairs; 
and I feel no inducement to discuss the question of their 
innocence or otherwise in relation to this particular amou- 
rette. I will only say that were it technically as innocent as 
you please, the mean which must be found between Thack- 
eray's somewhat too harsh and Mr. Fitzgerald's consider- 
ably too indulgent judgment on it will lie, it seems to me, 
decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter's extreme. 
This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an 
Indian " grass widow " was, in any case, an extremely un- 
lovely passage in Sterne's life. On the best and most 
charitable view of it, the flirtation, pursued in the way it 
was, and to the lengths to which it was carried, must be 



108 STERNE. [chap. 

held to convict the elderly lover of the most deplorable 
levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalisra. It 
was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of 
Sterne's age and profession ; and when it is added that 
Yorick's attentions to Eliza were paid in so open a fashion 
as to be brought by gossip to the ears of his neglected 
wife, then living many hundred miles away from him, its 
highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in 
all ways. 

No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set sail, 
than the sentimental lover began to feel so strongly the 
need of a female consoler, that his heart seems to have 
softened, insensibly, even towards his wife. "I am un- 
happy," he writes plaintively to Lydia Sterne. *' Thy 
mother and thyself at a distance from me — and what can 
compensate for such a destitution ? For God's sake per- 
suade her to come and ^x in England ! for life is too 
short to waste in separation ; and while she lives in one 
country and I in another, many people will suppose it 
proceeds from choice" — a supposition, he seems to imply, 
which even my scrupulously discreet conduct in her absence 
scarcely suffices to refute. " Besides " — a word in which 
there is here almost as much virtue as in an*' if " — " I want 
thee near me, thou child and darling of my heart. I am 
in a melancholy mood, and my Lydia's eyes will smart 
with weeping when I tell her the cause that just now 
affects me." And then his sensibilities brim over, and 
into his daughter's ear he pours forth his lamentations 
over the loss of her mother's rival. " I am apprehensive 
the dear friend I mentioned in my last letter is going into 
a decline. I was with her two days ago, and I never be- 
held a being so altered. She has a tender frame, and looks 
like- a drooping lily, for the roses are fled from her cheeks. 



yii] "THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY." 109 

I can never see or talk to this incomparable woman with- 
out bursting into tears. I have a thousand obligations to 
her, and I love her more than her whole sex, if not all the 
world put together. She has a delicacy," &c., &c. And 
after reciting a frigid epitaph which he had written, " ex- 
pressive of her modest worth," he winds up with — " Say 
all that is kind of me to thy mother; and believe me, m}^ 
Lydia, that I love thee most truly." My excuse for quot- 
ing thus fully from this most characteristic letter, and, in- 
deed, for dwelling at all upon these closing incidents of the 
Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their striking illus- 
tion of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent nature 
of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages 
of criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect 
of his literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life 
explains the sentimentalist in art. 

In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear 
himself away from London and its joys, and with painful 
slowness, for he was now in a wretched state of health, to 
make his way back to Yorkshire. " I have got conveyed," 
he says in a distressing letter from Newark to Hall Ste- 
venson — " I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of cadav- 
erous goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying in the 
bottom of my chaise most of the route, upon a large pillow 
which I had the prevoyance to purchase before i set out. 
I am worn out, but pass on to Barnby Moor to-night, and 
if possible to York the next. I know not what is the 
matter with me, but some derangement presses hard upon 
,this machine. Still, I think it will not be overset this 
bout " — another of those utterances of a cheerful courage 
under the prostration of pain which reveal to us the man- 
liest side of Sterne's nature. On reaching Coxwold his 
health appears to have temporarily mended, and in June 



no STERNE. [chap. 

we find him giving a far better account of liimself to an- 
other of his friends. The fresh Yorkshire air seems to 
have temporarily revived him, and to his friend, Arthur 
Lee, a young x\merican, he writes thus : " I am as happy 
as a prince at Coxwold, and I wish you could see in how 
princely a manner I live. 'Tis a land of plenty. I sit 
down alone to dinner — fish and wild-fowl, or a couple of 
fowls or ducks, with cream and all the simple plenty which 
a rich valley under Hamilton Hills can produce, with a 
clean cloth on my table, and a bottle of wine on my right 
hand to drink your health. I have a hundred hens and 
chickens about my yard ; and not a parishioner catches a 
hare, a rabbit, or a trout but he brings it as an offering to 
me." Another of his correspondents at this period was 
the Mrs. H. of his letters, whose identity I have been un- 
able to trace, but who is addressed in a manner which 
seems to show Sterne's anxiety to expel the old flame of 
Eliza's kindling by a new one. There is little, indeed, of 
the sentimentalizing strain in which he was wont to sigh 
at the feet of Mrs. Draper, but in its place there is a free- 
dom of a very prominent, and here and there of a highly 
unpleasant, kind. To his friends, Mr. and Mrs. James, too, 
he writes frequently during this year, chiefly to pour out 
his soul on the subject of Eliza; and Mrs. James, who is 
always addressed in company with her husband, enjoys 
the almost unique distinction of being the only woman 
outside his own family circle whom Sterne never ap- 
proaches in the language of artificial gallantry, but always 
in that of simple friendship and respect.^ Meanwhile, 

' To this period of Sterne's life, it may here be remarked, is to 
be assigned the dog-Latin letter (" and very sad dog-Latin too ") so 
justly animadverted upon by Thackeray, and containing a passage 
of which Madame de Medalle, it is to be charitably hoped, had no 



VII.] ^ "THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY." Ill 

however, the Sentimental Journey was advancing at a rea- 
sonable rate of speed towards completion. In July he 
writes of himself as " now beginning to be truly busy " 
on it, " the pain and sorrows of this life having retarded 
its progress." 

His wife and daughter were about to rejoin him in the 
autumn, and he looked forward to settling them at a hired 
house in York before going up to town to publish his new 
volumes. On the 1st of October the two ladies arrived at 
York, and the next day the reunited family went on to 
Cox wold. The meeting with the daughter gave Sterne 
one of the few quite innocent pleasures which he was ca- 
pable of feeling ; and he writes next day to Mr. and Mrs. 
James in terms of high pride and satisfaction of his recov- 
ered child. " My girl has returned," he writes, in the lan- 
guage of playful affection, " an elegant, accomplished little 
slut. My wife — but I hate," he adds, with remarkable 
presence of mind, " to praise my wife. 'Tis as much as 
decency will allow to praise my daughter. I suppose," he 
concludes, " they will return next summer to France. They 
leave me in a month to reside at York for the winter, and 
I stay at Coxwold till the 1st of January." This seems to 
indicate a little longer delay in the publication of the Sen- 
timental Journey than he had at first intended ; for it seems 
that the book was finished by the end of November. On 

suspicion of the meaning. Mr. Fitzgerald, through an oversight in 
translation, and understanding Sterne to say that he himself, and 
not his correspondent, Hall Stevenson, was "quadraginta et plus an- 
nos natus," has referred it to an earlier date. The point, however, 
is of no great importance, as the untranslatable passage in the let- 
ter would be little less unseemly in 1754 or 1755 than in 1768, at 
the beginning of which year, since the letter is addressed from Lon- 
don to Hall Stevenson, then in Yorkshire, it must, in fact, have been 
written. 



112 STERNE. [chap. 

the 2 8 til of that month he writes to the Earl of (as 

his daughter's foolish mysteriousness has headed the let- 
ter), to thank him for his letter of inquiry about Yorick, 
and to say that Yorick " has worn out both his spirits and 
body with the Sentimental Journey. 'Tis true that an 
author must feel himself, or his reader will not" (how 
mistaken a devotion Sterne showed to this Horatian can- 
on will be noted hereafter), " but I have torn my whole 
frame into pieces by my feelings. I believe the brain 
stands as much in need of recruiting as the body ; there- 
fore I shall set out for town the 20th of next month, af- 
ter having recruited myself at York." Then he adds the 
strange observation, '' I might, mdeed, solace myself with 
my wife (who is come from France), but, in fact, I have 
long been a sentimental being, whatever your Lordship 
may think to the contrary. The world has imagined be- 
cause I wrote Trhtram Shandy that I was myself more 
Shandian than I really ever was. 'Tis a good-natured 
world we live in, and we are often painted in divers col- 
ours, according to the ideas each one frames in his head." 
It would, perhaps, have been scarcely possible for Sterne 
to state his essentially unhealthy philosophy of life so 
concisely as- in this naive passage. The connubial affec- 
tions are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparent- 
ly, opposed to the sentimental emotions — as the lower to 
the higher. To indulge the former is to be " Shandian," 
that is to say, coarse and carnal ; to devote oneself to the 
latter, or, in other words, to spend one's days in semi- 
erotic languishings over the whole female sex indiscrimi- 
nately, is to show spirituality and taste. 

Meanwhile, however, that fragile abode of sentimental- 
ism — that frame which had just been "torn to pieces" 
by the feelings — was becoming weaker than its owner 



VII.] "THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.'^ 113 

supposed. Much of the exhaustion which Sterne had at- 
tributed to the violence of his literary emotions was no 
doubt due to the rapid decline of bodily powers which, 
unknown to him, were ah'eady within a few months of 
their final collapse. He did not set out for London on 
the 20th of December, as he had promised himself, for 
on that day he was only just recovering from '^ an attack 
of fever and bleeding at the lungs," which had confined 
him to his room for nearly three weeks. " I am worn 
down to a shadow," he writes on the 23rd, "but as my 
fever has left me, I set off the latter end of next week 
with my friend, Mr. Hall, for town." His home affairs 
had already been settled. Early in December it had been 
arrano'ed that his wife and dauo-hter should only remain 
at York during the winter, and should return to the Con- 
tinent in the spring. " Mrs. Sterne's health," he writes, 
" is insupportable in England. She must return to France, 
and justice and humanity forbid me to oppose it." But 
separation from his wife meant separation from his daugh- 
ter; it was this, of course, which was the really painful 
parting, and it is to the credit of Sterne's disinterestedness 
of affection for Lydia, that in his then state of health he 
brought himself to consent to her leaving him. But he 
recognized that it was for the adv^antage of her prospect 
of settling herself in life that she should go with her 
mother, who seemed " inclined to establish her in France, 
where she has had many advantageous offers." Neverthe- 
less " his heart bled," as he wrote to Lee, when he thought 
of parting with his child. " 'Twill be like the separation 
of soul and body, and equal to nothing but what passes at 
that tremendous moment ; and like it in one respect, for 
she will be in one kingdom while I am in another." Thus 
was this matter settled, and by the 1st of January Sterne 
6 



114 STERNE. [chap. 

had arrived in London for the last time, with the two 
volumes of the Sentimental Journey. He took up his 
quarters at the lodgings in Bond Street (No. 41), which 
he had occupied during his stay in town the previous year, 
and entered at once upon the arrarigements for publication. 
These occupied two full months, and on the 27th of Feb- 
ruary the last work, as it was destined to be, of the Rev. 
Mr. Yorick was issued to the world. 

Its success would seem to have been immediate, and was 
certainly great and lasting. In one sense, indeed, it was 
far greater than had been, or than has since been, attained 
by Tristram Shandy, The compliments which courteous 
Frenchmen had paid the author upon his former work, and 
which his simple vanity had swallowed whole and unsea- 
soned, without the much-needed grain of salt, might, no 
doubt, have been repeated to him with far greater sincer- 
ity as regards the Sentimental Journey^ had he lived to 
receive them. Had any Frenchman told him a year or 
two afterwards that the latter work was " almost as much 
known in Paris as in London, at least among men of con- 
dition and learning," he would very likely have been tell- 
ing him no more than the truth. The Sentimental Jour- 
ney certainly acquired what Tristram Shandy never did 
— a European reputation. It has been translated into 
Italian, German, Dutch, and even Polish ; and into French 
again and again. The French, indeed, have no doubt what- 
ever of its being Sterne's chef-d^oeuvre\ and one has only 
to compare a French translation of it with a rendering of 
Tristram Shandy into the same language to understand, 
and from our neighbours' point of view even to admit, the 
justice of their preference. The charms of the Journey , 
its grace, wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly congenial to 
that most graceful of languages, and reproduce themselves 



VII.] "THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY." 115 

readily enough therein; while, on the other hand, the fan- 
tastic digressions, the elaborate mystifications, the farcical 
interludes of the earlier work, appear intolerably awkward 
and hizzare in their French dress ; and, what is much more 
strange, even the point of the double entendres is sometimes 
unaccountably lost. Were it not that the genuine humour 
of Tri8tram Shandy in a great measure evaporates in trans- 
lation, one would be forced to admit that the work which 
is the more catholic in its appeal to appreciation is the bet- 
ter of the two. But, having regard to this disappearance 
of genuine and unquestionable excellences in the process 
of translation, I see no good reason why those Englishmen 
— the great majority, I imagine — who prefer Tristram 
Shandy to the Sentimental Journey should feel any mis- 
givings as to the soundness of their taste. The humour 
which goes the deepest down beneath the surface of things 
is the most likely to become inextricably interwoven with 
those deeper fibres of associations which lie at the roots 
of a language; and it may well happen, therefore, though- 
from the cosmopolitan point of view it is a melancholy 
reflection, that the merit of a book, to those who use the 
language in which it is written, bears a direct ratio to the 
persistence of its refusal to yield up its charm to men of 
another tongue. 

The favour, however, with which the Sentimental Jour- 
ney was received abroad, and which it still enjoys (the last 
French translation is very recent), is, as Mr. Fitzgerald says, 
*' worthily merited, if grace, nature, true sentiment, and ex- 
quisite dramatic power be qualities that are to find a wel- 
come. And apart," he adds, " from these attractions it 
has a unique charm of its own, a flavour, so to speak, a 
fragrance that belongs to that one book alone. Never 
was there such a charming series of complete little pict- 



116 STERNE. [cHAP.viL 

ures, which for delicacy seem like the series of medallions 
done on Sevres china which we sometimes see in old 
French cabinets. . . . The figures stand out brightly, and 
in what number and variety ! Old Calais, with its old 
inn ; M. Dessein, the monk, one of the most artistic fig- 
ures on literary canvas ; the charming French lady whom 
M. Dessein shut into the carriage with the traveller; the 
dehonnaire French captain, and the English travellers re- 
turning, touched in with only a couple of strokes; La 
Fleur, the valet; the pretty French glove - seller, whose 
pulse the Sentimental one felt; her husband, who passed 
through the shop and pulled off his hat to Monsieur for 
the honour he was doing him ; the little maid in the book- 
seller's shop, who put her little present a part; the charm- 
ing Greuze * grisset,' who sold him the ruffles ; the reduced 
chevalier selling pates ; the groups of beggars at Montreuil ; 
the fade Count de Bissie, who read Shakspeare ; and the 
crowd of minor croquis — postilions, landlords, notaries, sol- 
diers, abbes, precieuses, maids — merely touched, but touch- 
ed with wonderful art, make up a surprising collection of 
distinct and graphic characters." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 
(1768.) 

The end was now fast approaching. Months before, Sterne 
had written doubtfully of his being able to stand another 
winter in England, and his doubts were to be fatally justi- 
fied. One can easily see, however, how the unhappy ex- 
periment came to be tried. It is possible that he might 
have delayed the publication of his book for a while, and 
taken refuge abroad from the rigours of the two remaining 
winter months, had it not been in the nature of his malady 
to conceal its deadly approaches. Consumption sported 
with its victim in the cruel fashion that is its wont. " I 
continue to mend," Sterne writes from Bond Street on the 
first day of the new year, " and doubt not but this with all 
other evils and uncertainties of life will end for the best." 
And for the best perhaps it did end, in the sense in which 
the resigned Christian uses these pious words ; but this, 
one fears, was not the sense intended by the dying man. 
All through January and February he was occupied not 
only with business, but as it would seem with a fair amount, 
though less, no doubt, than his usual share, of pleasure also. 
Vastly active was he, it seems, in the great undertaking of 
obtaining tickets for one of Mrs. Cornely's entertainments 
—the "thing" to go to at that particular time— for his 



118 STERNE. [chap. 

friends the Jameses. He writes them on Monday that he 
has not been a moment at rest since writing the previous 
day about the Soho ticket. '' I have been at a Secretary 
of State to get one, have been upon one knee to my friend 
Sir George Macartney, Mr. Lascelles, and Mr. Fitzmaurice, 
without mentioning five more. I believe I could as soon 
get you a place at Court, for everybody is going; but I 
will go out and try a new circle, and if you do not hear 
from me by a quarter to three, you may conclude I have 
been unfortunate in my supplications." Whether he was 
or was not unfortunate history does not record. A week 
or two later the old round of dissipation had apparently 
set in. " I am now tied down neck and heels by engage- 
ments every night this week, or most joyfully would have 
trod the old pleasing road from Bond to Gerrard Street. 
.... I am quite well, but exhausted with a roomful of 
company every morning till dinner." A little later, and 
this momentary flash of health had died out ; and we find 
him writing what was his last letter to his daughter, full, 
evidently, of uneasy forebodings as to his approaching end. 
He speaks of "this vile influenza — be not alarmed. I 
think I shall get the better of it, and shall be with you 
both the 1st of May;" though, he" adds, "if I escape, 
'twill not be for a long period, my child — unless a 
quiet retreat and peac(3 of mind can restore me." But the 
occasion of this letter was a curious one, and a little more 
must be extracted from it. Lydia Sterne's letter to her 
father had, he said, astonished him. "She (Mrs. Sterne) 
could know but little of my feelings to tell thee that under 
the supposition I should survive thy mother I should be- 
queath thee as a legacy to Mrs. Draper. No, my Lydia, 
'tis a lady whose virtues I wish thee to imitate" — Mrs. 
James, in fact, whom he proceeds to praise with much and 



VIII.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 119 

probably well-deserved warmth. " But," he adds, sadly, " I 
think, my Lydia, thy mother will survive me ; do not de- 
ject her spirit with thy apprehensions on ray account. I 
have sent you a necklace and buckles, and the same to 
your mother. My girl cannot form a wish that is in the 
power of her father that he will not gratify her in ; and I 
cannot in justice be less kind to thy mother. I ain never 
alone. The kindness of my friends is ever the same. I 
wish though I had thee to nurse me, but I am denied that. 
Write to me twice a week at least. God bless thee, my 
child, and believe me ever, ever, thy affectionate father." 
The despondent tone of this letter was to be only too soon 
justified. The *' vile influenza" proved to be or became 
a pleurisy. On Thursday, March 10, he was bled three 
times, and blistered on the day after. And on the Tues- 
day following, in evident consciousness that his end was 
near, he penned that cry " for pity and pardon," as Thack- 
eray calls it — the first as well as the last, and which sounds 
almost as strange as it does piteous from those mocking 
lips : 

" The physician says I am better. . . . God knows, for I feel my- 
self sadly wrong, and shall, if I recover, be a long while of gaining 
strength. Before I have gone through half the letter I must stop to 
rest my weak hand a dozen times. Mr. James was so good as to call 
upon me yesterday. I felt emotions not to be described at the sight 
of him, and he overjoyed me by talking a great deal of you. Do, 
dear Mrs. James, entreat him to come to-morrow or next day, for per- 
haps I have not many days or hours to live. I want to ask a favour 
of him, if I find myself worse, that I shall beg of you if in this wrest- 
ling I come off conqueror. My spirits are fled. It is a bad omen ; 
do not weep, my dear lady. Your tears are too precious to be shed 
for me. Bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn. Dearest, 
kindest, gentlest, and best of women ! may health, peace, and happi- 
ness prove your handmaids. If I die, cherish the remembrance of 



120 STERNE. [chap. 

me, and forget the follies which you so often condemned, which my 
heart, not my head, betrayed me into. Should my child, my Lydia, 
want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her 
to your bosom ? You are the only woman on earth I can depend 
upon for such a benevolent action. I wrote to her a fortnight ago, 
and told her what, I trust, she will find in you. Mr. James will be a 
father to her. . . . Commend me to him, as I now commend you to 
that Being who takes under his care the good and kind part of the 
world. Adieu, all grateful thanks to you and Mr. James. 

*' From your affectionate friend, L. Sterne." 

This pathetic death -bed letter is superscribed "Tues- 
day." It seems to have been written on Tuesday, the 15th 
of March, and three days later the writer breathed his last. 
But two persons, strangers both, were present at his death- 
bed, and it is by a singularly fortunate chance, therefore, 
that one of these^ — and he not belonging to the class of 
people who usually leave behind them published records 
of the events of their lives — should have preserved for us 
an account of the closing scene. This, however, is to be 
found in the Memoirs of John Macdonald, " a cadet of the 
house of Keppoch," at that time footman to Mr. Crawford, 
a fashionable friend of Sterne's. His master had taken a 
house in Clifford Street in the spring of 1768 ; and "about 
this time," he writes, "Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, 
was taken ill at the silk -bag shop in Old Bond Street. 
He was sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes 
Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen. One 
day" — namely, on the aforesaid 18th of March — "my 
master had company to dinner who were speaking about 
him — the Duke of Roxburghe, the Earl of March, the Earl 
of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, 
and a Mr. James." Many, if not most, of the party, there- 
fore, were personal friends of the man who lay dying in 
the street hard by, and naturally enough the conversation 



VIII.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 121 

turned on his condition. " ' John/ " said my master," the 
narrative continues, " * go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is 
to-day.' " Macdonald did so ; and, in language which 
seems to bear the stamp of truth upon it, he thus records 
the grim story which he had to report to the assembled 
guests on his return : " I went to Mr. Sterne's lodgings ; 
the mistress opened the door. I enquired how he did ; 
she told me to go up to the nurse. I went into the room, 
and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes ; but in 
five he said, 'Now it is come.' He put up his hand as if 
to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen 
were all very sorry, and lamented him very much." 

Thus, supported by a hired nurse, and under the curious 
eyes of a stranger, Sterne breathed his last. His wife and 
daughter were far away ; the convivial associates '' who were 
all very sorry and lamented him very much," were for the 
moment represented only by "John ;" and the shocking tra- 
dition goes that the alien hands by which the "" dying eyes 
were closed," and the " decent limbs composed," remuner- 
ated themselves for the pious oflBce by abstracting the gold 
sleeve-links from the dead man's wrists. One may hope, 
indeed, that this last circumstance is to be rejected as sen- 
sational legend, but even without it the story of Sterne's 
death seems sad enough, no doubt. Yet it is, after all, 
only by contrast with the excited gaiety of his daily life 
in London that his end appears so forlorn. From many 
a " set of residential chambers," from many of the old and 
silent inns of the lawyers, departures as lonely, or lonelier, 
are being made around us in London every year : the de- 
partures of men not necessarily kinless or friendless, but 
living solitary lives, and dying before their friends or kin- 
dred can be summoned to their bedsides. Such deaths, no 
doubt, are often contrasted in conventional pathos with that 
I 6* 



122 STERNE. [chap. 

of the husband and father surrounded by a weeping wife 
and children ; but the more sensible among us construct 
no tragedy out of a mode of exit which must have many 
times entered as at least a possibility into the previous 
contemplation of the dying man. And except, as has been 
said, that Sterne associates himself in our minds with the 
perpetual excitements of lively companionship, there would 
be nothing particularly melancholy in his end. This is 
subject, of course, to the assumption that the story of his 
landlady having stolen the gold sleeve-links from his dead 
body may be treated as mythical ; and, rejecting this story, 
there seems no good reason for making much ado about 
the manner of his death. Of friends, as distinguished from 
mere dinner-table acquaintances, he seems to have had but 
few in London : with the exception of the Jameses, one 
knows not with certainty of any ; and the Jameses do not 
appear to have neglected him in the illness which neither 
they nor he suspected to be his last. Mr. James had paid 
him a visit but a day or two before the end came ; and it 
may very likely have been upon his report of his friend's 
condition that the message of inquiry was sent from the 
dinner table at which he was a guest. No doubt Sterne's 
flourish in Tristram Shandy about his preferring to die 
at an inn, untroubled by the spectacle of '* the concern of 
my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and 
smoothing my pillow," was a mere piece of bravado ; and 
the more probably so because the reflection is appropriated 
almost bodily from Bishop Burnet, who quotes it as a fre- 
quent observation of Archbishop Leighton. But, consid- 
ering that Sterne was in the habit of passing nearly half 
of each year alone in London lodgings, the realization of 
his wish does not strike me, I confess, as so dramatically 
impressive a coincidence as it is sometimes represented. 



VIII.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 123 

According, however, to one strange story the dramatic 
element gives phice after Sterne's very burial to melodrama 
of the darkest kind. The funeral, which pointed, after all, 
a far sadder moral than the death, took place on Tuesday, 
March 22, attended by only two mourners, one of whom is 
said to have been his publisher Becket, and the other prob- 
ably Mr. James ; and, thus duly neglected by the whole 
crowd of boon companions, the remains of Yorick were 
consigned to the " new burying-ground near Tyburn " of 
the parish of St. George's, Hanover Square. In that now 
squalid and long-decayed grave-yard, within sight of the 
Marble Arch and over against the broad expanse of Hyde 
Park, is still to be found a tombstone inscribed with some 
inferior lines to the memory of the departed humourist, 
and with a statement, inaccurate by eight months, of the 
date of his death, and a year out as to his age. Dying, as 
has been seen, on the 18th of March, 1768, at the age of 
fifty-four, he is declared on this slab to have died on the 
13th of November, aged fifty-three years. There is more 
excuse, however, for this want of veracity than sepulchral 
inscriptions can usually plead. The stone was erected by 
the pious hands of " two brother Masons," many years, it 
is said, after the event which it purports to record ; and 
from the wording of the epitaph which commences, " Near 
this place lyes the body," &c., it obviously does not profess 
to indicate — what, doubtless, there was no longer any 
means of tracing — the exact spot in which Sterne's re- 
mains were laid. But, wherever the grave really was, the 
body interred in it, according to the strange story to 
which I have referred, is no longer there. That story goes : 
that two days after the burial, on the night of the 24th of 
March, the corpse was stolen by body-snatchers, and by 
them disposed of to M. CoUignon, Professor of Anatomy 



124 ' STERNK. [chap. 

at Cambridge ; that the Professor invited a few scientific 
friends to witness a demonstration, and that among these 
was one who had been acquainted with Sterne, and who 
fainted with horror on recognizing in the already partially 
dissected " subject " the features of his friend. So, at 
least, this very gruesome and Poe-like legend runs ; but 
it must be confessed that all the evidence which Mr. Fitz- 
gerald has been able to collect in its favour is of the very 
loosest and vaguest description. On the other hand, it is, 
of course, only fair to recollect that, in days when respect- 
able surgeons and grave scientific professors had to de- 
pend upon the assistance of law-breakers for the prosecu- 
tion of their studies and teachings, every effort would 
naturally be made to hush up any such unfortunate affair. 
There is, moreover, independent evidence to the fact that 
similar desecrations of this grave-yard had of late been 
very common, and that at least one previous attempt to 
check the operations of the *' resurrection-men " had been 
attended with peculiarly infelicitous results. In the St 
Jameses Chronicle for November 26, 1767, we find it re- 
corded that " the Burying Ground in Oxford Road, belong- 
ing to the Parish of St. George's, Hanover Square, having 
been lately robbed of several dead bodies, a Watcher was 
placed there, attended by a large mastiff Dog; notwith- 
standing which, on Sunday night last, some Villains found 
means to steal out another dead Body, and carried off the 
very Dog." Body-snatchers so adroit and determined as 
to contrive to make additional profit out of the actual 
means taken to prevent their depredations, would certainly 
not have been deterred by any considerations of prudence 
from attempting the theft of Sterne's corpse. There was 
no such ceremony about his funeral as would lead them to 
suppose that the deceased was a person of any importance, 



YilL] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 125 

or one whose body could not be stolen without a risk of 
creating undesirable excitement. On the whole, therefore, 
it is impossible to reject the body-snatching story as cer- 
tainly fabulous, though its truth is far from being proved ; 
and though I can scarcely myself subscribe to Mr. Fitz- 
gerald's view, that there is a ** grim and lurid Shandyism " 
about the scene of dissection, yet if others discover an 
appeal to their sense of humour in the idea of Sterne's 
body being dissected after death, I see nothing to prevent 
them from holding that hypothesis as a " pious opinion*" 



CHAPTER IX. 

STERNE AS A WRITER. THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM. 

DR. ferriar's "illustrations." 

Everyday experience suffices to show that the qualities 
which win enduring fame for books and for their authors 
are not always those to which they owe their first popu- 
larity. It may with the utmost probability be affirmed 
that this was the case with Tristram Shandy and with 
Sterne. We cannot, it is true, altogether dissociate the 
permanent attractions of the novel from those character- 
istics of it which have long since ceased to attract at all ; 
the two are united in a greater or less degree throughout 
the work ; and this being so, it is, of course, impossible to 
prove to demonstration that it was the latter qualities, and 
not the former, which procured it its immediate vogue. 
But, as it happens, it is possible to show that what may 
be called its spurious attractions varied directly, and its 
real merits inversely, as its popularity with the public of 
its day. In the higher qualities of humour, in dramatic 
vigour, in skilful and subtle delineation of character, the 
novel showed no deterioration, but, in some instances, a 
marked improvement, as it proceeded ; yet the second in- 
stalment was not more popular, and most of the succeed- 
ing ones were distinctly less popular, than the first. They 
had gained in many qualities, while they had lost in only 
the single one of novelty ; and we may infer, therefore. 



CHAP. IX.] THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM. 127 

with approximate certainty, that what " took the town " 
in the first instance was, that quahty of the book which 
was strangest at its first appearance. The mass of the pub- 
lic read, and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they 
were really only puzzled and perplexed. The wild digres- 
sions, the audacious impertinences, the burlesque philoso- 
phizing, the broad jests, the air of recondite learning, all 
combined to make the book a nine davs' wonder; and a 
majority of its readers would probably have been prepared 
to pronounce Trutram Shandy a work as original in 
scheme and conception as it was eccentric. Some there 
were, no doubt, who perceived the influence of Rabelais in 
the incessant digressions and the burlesque of philosophy ; 
others, it may be, found a reminder of Burton in the pa- 
rade of learning ; and yet a few others, the scattered stu- 
dents of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteentli 
centuries, may have read the broad jests with a feeling 
that thev had " seen somethino^ like it before." But no 

»/ CD 

single reader, no single critic of the time, appears to have 
combined the knowledge necessary for tracing these three 
characteristics of the novel to their respective sources; and 
none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to which 
the books and authors from whom they were imitated had 
been laid under contribution. No one suspected that 
Sterne, not content with borrowing his trick of rambling 
from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from Burton, and 
his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred 
whole passages from the second of these writers, not only 
without acknowledgment, but with the intention, obvious- 
ly indicated by his mode of procedure, of passing them 
off as his own. Nay, it was not till full fifty years after- 
w^ards that these daring robberies were detected, or, at any 
rate, revealed to the world ; and, with an irony which Sterne 



VIZ STERNE. [chap. 

himself would have appreciated, it was, reserved for a sin- 
cere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detec- 
tive. In 1812 Dr. John Ferriar published his Illustrations 
of Sterne^ and the prefatory sonnet, in which he solicits 
pardon for his too minnte investigations, is sufficient proof 
of the curiously reverent spirit in which he set about his 
damaging task : 

" Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways 
Of antic wit, and quibbling mazes drear, 
Let not thy shade malignant censure fear, 

If aught of inward mirth my search betrays. 

Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days, 
Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear," &c. 

Thus commences Dr. Ferriar's apology, which, however, 
can hardly be held to cover his offence ; for, as a matter 
of fact, Sterne's borrowings extend to a good deal besides 
"mirth;" and some of the most unscrupulous of these 
forced loans are raised from passages of a perfectly seri- 
ous import in the originals from which they are taken. 

Here, however, is the list of authors to whom Dr. Fer- 
riar holds Sterne to have been more or less indebted : 
Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Bouchet, Bruscambille, Scar- 
ron, Swift, an author of the name or pseudonym of "Ga- 
briel John," Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop Hall. 
The catalogue is a reasonably long one ; but it is not, of 
course, to be supposed that Sterne helped himself equally 
freely from every author named in it. His obligations to 
some of them are, as Dr. Ferriar admits, but slight. From 
Rabelais, besides his vagaries of narrative, Sterne took, no 
doubt, the idea of the Tristra-pcedia (by descent from the 
"education of Pantagruel," through " Martin us Scrible- 
rus"); but though he has appropriated bpdily the passage 
in which Friar John attributes the beauty of his nose to 



IX.] DR. FERRIAR'S "ILLUSTRATIONS." 129 

the pectoral confonnation of his nurse, he may be said to 
have constructively acknowledged the debt in a reference 
to one of the characters in the Rabelaisian dialogue.^ 

Upon Beroalde, again, upon D'Aubigne, and upon Bou- 
chet he has made no direct and verbatim depredations. 
From Bruscambille he seems to have taken little or noth- 
ing but the not very valuable idea of the tedious buffoon- 
ery of vol. iii. c. 30, et sqq. ; and to Scarron he, perhaps, 
owed the incident of the dwarf at the theatre in the Sen- 
timental Journey^ an incident which, it must be owned, he 
vastly improved in the taking. All this, however, does not 
amount to very much, and it is only when we come to Dr. 
Ferriar's collations of Tristram Shandy with the Anatomy 
of Melancholy that we begin to understand what feats 
Sterne was capable of as a plagiarist. He must, to begin 
with, have relied with cynical confidence on the conviction 
that famous writers are talked about and not read, for he 
sets to work with the scissors upon Burton's first page : 
*^ Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world, 
the principal and mighty work of God; wonder of nature, 
as Zoroaster calls him ; audacis natures miraculum^ the 
marvel of marvels, as Plato ; the abridgment and epitome 
of the world, as Pliny," &c. Thus Burton; and, with a 

* " There is no cause but one," said my Uncle Toby, " why one 
man's nose is longer than another, but because that God pleases to 
have it so.'' ** That is Grangousier's solution," said my father. 
*' 'Tis He," continued my Uncle Toby, " who makes us all, and frames 
and puts us together in such forms . . . and for such ends as is 
agreeable to His infinite wisdom." — Tristram Shandy^ vol. iii. c. 41. 
*' Par ce, repondit Grangousier, qu'ainsi Dieu I'a voulu, lequel nous 
fait en cette forme et cette fin selon divin arbitre." — Rabelais^ book i. 
c. 41. In another place, however (v'ol. viii. c. 3), Sterne has borrowed 
a whole passage from this French humourist without any acknowl- 
edgment at all. 



130 STERNE. [chap 

few additions of his own, and the substitution of Aristotle 
for Plato as the author of one of the descriptions, thus 
Sterne: "Who made Man with powers which dart him 
from heaven to earth in a moment — that great, that most 
excellent and noble creature of the world, the miracle of 
nature, as Zoroaster, in his book wepl ^vo-fwc, called him — 
the Shekinah of the Divine Presence, as Chrysostom — the 
image of God, as Moses — the ray of Divinity, as Plato — 
the marvel of marvels, as Aristotle," &c/ And in the 
same chapter, in the " Fragment upon Whiskers," Sterne 
relates how a "decayed kinsman" of the Lady Baussiere 
" ran begging, bareheaded, on one side of her palfrey, con- 
juring her by the former bonds of friendship, alliance, con- 
sanguinity, (fee. — cousin, aunt, sister, mother — for virtue's 
sake, for your own sake, for mine, for Christ's sake, re- 
member me! pity me!" And again he tells how a "de- 
vout, venerable, hoary-headed man" thus beseeched her: 
" ' I beg for the unfortunate. Good my lady, 'tis for a 
prison — ^for an hospital ; 'tis for an old man — a poor man 
undone by shipwreck, by suretyship, by fire. I call God 
and all His angels to witness, 'tis to clothe the naked, to 
feed the hungry — 'tis to comfort the sick and the broken- 
hearted.' The Lady Baussiere rode on."^ 

But now compare this passage from the Anatomy of 
Melancholy : 

*' A poor decayed kinsman of his sets upon him by the way, in all 
his jollity, and runs begging, bareheaded, by him, conjuring him by 
those former bonds of friendship, aUiance, consanguinity, &c., ^ uncle, 
cousin, brother, father, show some pity for Christ's sake, pity a 
sick man, an old man,' &c. ; he cares not — ride on: pretend sick- 
ness, inevitable loss of limbs, plead suretyship or shipwreck, fire, 
common calamities, show thy wants and imperfections, take God 

^ Trif^tram Shandy^ vol. v. c. 1. ^ Ihid. 



3X.] DR. FERRIAR'S " ILLUSTRATIONS." 131 

and all His angels to witness . . . put up a supplication to him in 
the name of a thousand orphans, an hospital, a spittle, a prison, as 
he goes by . . . ride on.^ 

Hardly a casual coincidence this. But it is yet more 
unpleasant to find that the mock philosophic reflections 
with which Mr. Shandy consoles himself on Bobby's 
death, in those delightful chapters on that event, are not 
taken, as they profess to be, direct from the sages of an- 
tiquity, but have been conveyed through, and "conveyed" 
from, Burton. 

" When Agrippina was told of her son's death," says 
Sterne, " Tacitus informs us that, not being able to mod- 
erate her passions, she abruptly broke off her work." 
Tacitus does, it is true, inform us of this. But it was un- 
doubtedly Burton {AnaL MeL, p. 213) who informed Sterne 
of it. So, too, when Mr. Shandy goes on to remark upon 
death that " 'Tis an inevitable chance — the first statute in 
Magna Charta — it is an everlasting Act of Parliament, my 
dear brother — all must die," the agreement of his views 
with those of Burton, who had himself said of death, " 'Tis 
an inevitable chance — the first statute in Maojna Charta — 
an everlasting Act of Parliament — all must die,"*^ is even 
textually exact. 

In the next passage, however, the humourist gets the 
better of the plagiarist, and we are ready to foi^give the 
theft for the happily comic turn which he gives to it. 

Burton : 

" TuUy was much grieved for his daughter TuUiola's death at first, 
until such time that he had confirmed his mind by philosophical pre- 
cepts ; then he began to triumph over fortune and grief, and for her 
reception into heaven to be much more joyed than before he was 
troubled for her loss." 

^ Burton : Anut. Mel., p. 269. ^ /j^-j^ p 215. 



132 STeRN^E. [chaK 

Sterne : 

" When TuUy was bereft of his daughter, at first he laid it to his 
heart, he hsteiied to the voice of nature, and modulated his own unto 
it. my TuUia ! my daughter ! my child !— Still, still, still— 'twas 
my Tullia, my TuUia ! Methinks I see my Tullia, I hear my Tullia^ 
I talk with my Tullia. But as soon as he began to look into the 
stores of philosophy, and consider how many excellent things might he 
said upon the occasion, nobody on earth can conceive, says the great 
orator, how happy, how joyful it made me." 

" Kingdoms and provinces, cities and towns,'' continues 
Burton, " have their periods, and are consumed. " " King- 
doms and provinces, and towns and cities," exclaims Mr, 
Shandy, throwing the sentence, like the " born orator ' 
his son considered him, into the rhetorical interrogative 
" have they not their periods ?" " Where," he proceeds, 
'*is Troy, and Mycena?, and Thebes, and Delos, and Per 
sepolis, and Agrigentum ? What is become, brother Toby 
of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cyzicum and Mytilene ? The 
fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon " (and all, with 
the curious exception of Mytilene, enumerated by Burton) 
" are now no more." And then the famous consolatory 
letter from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero on the death of 
Tullia is laid under contribution — Burton's rendering of 
the Latin being followed almost word for word. " Return- 
ing out of A55ia," declaims Mr. Shandy, " when I sailed 
from ^gina towards Megara " (when can this have been ? 
thought my Uncle Toby), " I began to view the country 
round about. JEgina was behind me, Megara before," (fee, 
and so on, down to the final reflection of the philosopher, 
" Remember that thou art but a man ;" at which point 
Sterne remarks coolly, " Now, my Uncle Toby knew not 
that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpici- 
us's consolatory letter to Tully " — the thing to be really 



IX.] DR. FERRIAB^S '* ILLUSTRATIONS." 133 

known being that the paragraph was, in fact, Servius Sul- 
picius filtered through Barton. Again, and still quoting 
from the Anatomy of Melancholy^ Mr. Shandy remarks 
how " the Thracians wept when a child was born, and 
feasted and made merry when a man went out of the 
world; and with reason.'' He then goes on to lay pred- 
atory hands on that fine, sad passage in Lucian, which 
Burton had quoted before him : " Is it not better not to 
hunger at all, than to eat? not to thirst, than to take physic 
to cure it V (why not " than to drink to satisfy thirst ?" 
as Lucian wrote and Burton translated). " Is it not better 
to be freed from cares and agues, love and melancholy, and 
the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled trav- 
eller who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin 
his journey afresh ?" Then, closing his Burton and open- 
ing his Bacon at the Essay on Deaths he adds : " There is 
no terror, brother Toby, in its (Death's) looks but what it 
borrows from groans and convulsions, and " (here parody 
forces its way in) *' the blowing of noses, and the wiping 
away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a sick man's 
bed-room ;" and with one more theft from Burton, after 
Seneca : " Consider, brother Toby, when we are, death is 
not ; and when death is, we are not," this extraordinary 
cento of plagiarisms concludes. 

Not that this is Sterne's only raid upon the quaint old 
writer of whom he has here made such free use. Several 
other instances of word for word appropriation might be 
quoted from this and the succeeding volumes of Tristram 
Shandy. The apostrophe to '' blessed health," in c. xxxiii. 
of vol. V. is taken direct from the Anatomy of Melancholy ; 
so is the phrase, *' He has a gourd for his head and a pip- 
pin for his heart," in c. ix. ; so is the jest about Franciscus 
Ribera's computation of the amoutit of cubic space required, 



134 STERNE. [chap. 

by the souls of the lost; so is Hilarion the hermit's com- 
parison of his body with its unruly passions to a kicking 
ass. And there is a passage in the Sentimental Journey^ 
the *' Fragment in the Abderitans," which shows, Dr. 
Ferriar thinks — though it does not seem to me to show 
conclusively — that Sterne was unaware that what he was 
taking from Burton had been previously taken by Burton 
from Lucian. 

There is more excuse, in the opinion of the author of the 
Illustrations^ for the literary thefts of the preacher than 
for those of the novelist ; since in sermons, Dr. Ferriar 
observes drily, " the principal matter must consist of repe- 
titions." But it can hardly, I think, be admitted that the 
kind of " repetitions " to which Sterne had recourse in the 
pulpit — or, at any rate, in compositions ostensibly prepared 
for the pulpit— are quite justifiable. Professor Jebb has 
pointed out, in a recent volume of this series, that the de- 
scription of the tortures of the Inquisition, which so deep- 
ly moved Corporal Trim in the famous Sermon on Con- 
science, was really the work of Bentley ; but Sterne has 
pilfered more freely from a divine more famous as a 
preacher than the great scholar whose words he appropri- 
ated on that occasion. ** Then shame and grief go with 
her," he exclaims in his singular sermon on " The Levite 
and his Concubine ;" " and wherever she seeks a shelter 
may the hand of Justice shut the door against her!" an 
exclamation which is taken, as, no doubt, indeed, was the 
whole suggestion of the somewhat strange subject, from 
the Contemplations of Bishop Hall. And so, again, we 
find in Sterne's sermon the following : 

" Mercy well becomes the heart of all Thy creatures ! but most of 
Thy servant, a Levite, who offers up so many daily sacrifices to Thee 
for the transgressions of Thy people. But to little purpose, he would 



IX.] DR. FERRIAR'S ' ILLUSTRATIONS." 1^5 

add, have I served at Thy altar, where my business was to sue for 
mercy, had I not learned to practise it." 

And ill HalFs Contemplations the following : 

*' Mercy becomes well the heart of any man, but most of a Levite. 
He that had helped to offer so many sacrifices to God for the multi- 
tude of every Israelite's sins saw how proportionable it was that man 
should not hold one sin unpardonable. He had served at the altar 
to no purpose, if he (whose trade was to sue for mercy) had not at all 
learned to practise it." 

Sterne's twelfth sermon, on the Forgiveness of Injuries, 
is merely a diluted commentary on the conclusion of Hall's 
*' Contemplation of Joseph." In the sixteenth sermon, the 
one on Shimei, we find : 

" There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a sea- 
son to give a mark of enmity and ill will : a word, a look, which at 
one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the 
heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, 
with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object 
aimed at." 

This, it is evident, is but slightly altered, and by no 
means for the better, from the more terse and vigorous 
language of the Bishop : 

*' There is no small cruelty in the picking out of a time for mis- 
chief : that word would scarce gall at one season which at another 
killeth. The same shaft flying with the wind pierces deep, which 
against it can hardly find strength to stick upright." 

But enough of these pieces de conviction. Indictments 
for plagiarism are often too hastily laid ; but there can be 
no doubt, I should imagine, in the mind of any reasonable 
being upon the evidence here cited, that the offence in this 
case is clearly proved. Nor, I think, can there be much 
question as to its moral complexion. For the pilferings 



106 STERNE. [chap. 

from Bishop Hall, at any rate, no shadow of excuse c-an, 
so far as I can see, be alleged. Sterne could not possibly 
plead any better justification for borrowing Hall's thoughts 
and phrases and passing them off upon his liearers or read- 
ers as original, than he could plead for claiming the au- 
thorship of one of the Bishop's benevolent actions and 
representing himself to the world as the doer of the good 
deed. In the actual as in the hypothetical case there is a 
dishonest appropriation by one man of the credit — in the 
former case the intellectual, in the latter the moral credit 
—belonging to another : the offence in the actual case be- 
ing aggravated by the fact that it involves a fraud upon 
the purchaser of the sermon, who pays money for what he 
may already have in his library. The plagiarisms from 
Burton stand upon a slightly different though not, I 
think, a much more defensible footing. For in this case it 
has been urged that Sterne, being desirous of satirizing ped- 
antry, was justified in resorting to the actually existent 
writings of an antique pedant of real life ; and that since 
Mr. Shandy could not be made to talk more like himself 
than Burton talked like Am, it was artistically lawful to 
put Burton's exact words into Mr. Shandy's mouth. It 
makes a difference, it may be said, that Sterne is not here 
speaking in his own person, as he is in his Seinnons, but 
in the person of one of his characters. This casuistry, 
however, does not seem to me to be sound. Even as re- 
gards the passages from ancient authors, which, while 
quoting them from Burton, he tacitly represents to his 
readers as taken from his own stores of knowledge, the 
excuse is hardly sufficient; while as regards the original 
reflections of the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy 
it obviously fails to apply at all. And in any case there 
could be no necessity for the omission to acknowledge the 



IX.] DR. FERRIAR'S " ILLUSTRATIONS." 137 

debt. Even admitting that no raore characteristic reflec- 
tions could have been composed for Mr. Shandy than were 
actually to be found in Burton, art is not so exacting a 
mistress as to compel the artist to plagiarize against his 
will. A scrupulous writer, being also as ingenious as 
Sterne, could have found some means of indicating the 
source from which he was borrowing without destroying 
the dramatic illusion of the scene. 

But it seems clear enough that Sterne himself was trou- 
bled by no conscientious qualms on this subject. Perhaps 
the most extraordinary instance of literary effrontery which 
was ever met with is the passage in vol. v. c. 1, which 
even that seasoned detective Dr. Ferriar is startled into 
pronouncing *' singular." Burton had complained that 
writers were like apothecaries, who ^' make new mixtures 
every day," by "' pouring out of one vessel into another." 
" We weave," he said, " the same web still, twist the same 
rope again and again." And Sterne incolumi gravitate 
asks : " Shall we forever make new books as apothecaries 
make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into 
another? Are we forefver to be twisting and untwisting 
the same rope, forever on the same track, forever at the 
same pace ?" And this he writes with the scissors actually 
opened in his hand for the almost bodily abstraction of 
the passage beginning, " Man, the most excellent and no- 
ble creature of the world !" Surely this denunciation of 
plagiarism by a plagiarist on the point of setting to work 
could only have been written by a man who looked upon 
plagiarism as a good joke. 

Apart, however, from the moralities of the matter, it 

must in fairness be admitted that in most cases Sterne is no 

servile copyist. He appropriates other men's thoughts and 

phrases, and with them, of course, the credit for the wit, 

K 7 



138 STERNE. [chap. ix. 

the truth, the vigour, or the learning which characterizes 
them ; but he is seldoni found, in Tristram Shandy^ at any 
rate, to have transferred them to his own pages out of a 
mere indolent inclination to save himself the trouble of 
composition. He takes them less as substitutes than as 
groundwork for his own invention — as so much material 
for his own inventiv^e powers to work upon ; and those 
powers do generally work upon them with conspicuous 
skill of elaboration. The series of cuttings, for instance, 
which he makes from Burton, on the occasion of Bobby 
Shandy's death, are woven into the main tissue of the dia- 
logue with remarkable ingenuity and naturalness ; and the 
bright strands of his own unborrowed humour fly flashing 
across the fabric at every transit of the shuttle. Or, to 
change the metaphor, we may say that in almost every in- 
stance the jewels that so glitter in their stolen setting were 
cut and set by Sterne himself. Let us allow that the most 
expert of lapidaries is not justified in stealing his settings ; 
but let us still not forget that the jewels are his, or permit 
our disapproval of his laxity of principle to make us un- 
just to his consummate skill. 



CHAPTER X. 

STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. HUMOUR AND 

SENTIMENT. 

To talk of " the style " of Sterne is almost to play one of 
tliosjj tricks with language of which he himself was so 
fond\ For there is hardly any definition of the word 
whic.^ can make it possible to describe him as having any 
style at all. It is not only that he manifestly recognized 
no external canons whereto to conform the expression of 
his thoughts, but he had, apparently, no inclination to in- 
vent and observe — except, indeed, in the most negative of 
senses — any style of his own. The " style of Sterne," in 
short, is as though one should say " the form of Proteus.'^ 
He was determined to be uniformly eccentric,- regularly 
irregular, and that w^as all. His digressions, his asides, 
and his fooleries in general would, of course, have in any 
case necessitated a certain general jerkiness of manner; 
but this need hardly have extended itself habitually to the 
structure of individual sentences, and as a matter of fact 
he can at times write, as he does for the most part in his 
Sermons^ in a style which is not the less vigorous for be- 
ing fairly correct. But as a rule his mode of expressing 
himself is destitute of any pretensions to precision ; and 
in many instances it is a perfect marvel of literary slip- 
shod. Nor fs there any ground for believing that the 



140 STERNE. [chap. 

slovenliness was invariably intentional. Sterne's truly 
hideous French — French at which even Stratford-atte- 
Bowe would have stood aghast- — is in itself sufficient evi- 
dence of a natural insensibility to grammatical accuracy. 
Here there can be no suspicion of designed defiance of 
rules ; and more than one solecism of rather a serious kind 
in his use of English words and phrases affords confirm- 
atory testimony to the same point. His punctuation is 
fearful and wonderful, even for an age in which the ra- 
tionale of punctuation was more imperfectly understood 
than it is at present ; and this, though an apparently slight 
matter, is not without value as an indication of w/,ys of 
thought. But if we can hardly describe Sterne's s'^/le as 
being in the literary sense a style at all, it has a vf^Ty dis- 
tinct colloquial character of its own, and as such it 1^ near- 
ly as much deserving of praise a^ from the literary point 
of view it is open to exception. Chaotic as it is in the syn- 
tactical sense, it is a perfectly clear vehicle for the convey- 
ance of thought : we are as rarely at a loss for the meaning 
of one of Sterne's sentences as we are, for very different 
reasons, for the meaning of one of Macaulay's. And his 
language is so full of life and colour, his tone so animated 
and vivacious, that we forget we are reading and not listen- 
ing^ and we are as little disposed to be exacting in respect 
to form as though we w^ere listeners in actual fact, Sterne's 
manner, in short, may be that of a bad and careless writer, 
but it is the manner of a first-rate talker; a.nd this,* of 
course, enhances rather than detracts from tke unwearying 
charm of his wit and humour. 

To attempt a precise and final distinction bfetween these 
two last-named qualities in Sterne or any one else would 
be no very hopeful task, perhaps ; but those who have a 
keen perception of either find no great diflliculty in dis- 



X.] STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 141 

criminating, as a matter of feeling, between the two. And 
what is true of the qualities themselves is true, mutatis 
mutandis, of the men by whom they have been most con-^ 
spicuously displayed. Some wits have been humourists 
also; nearly all humourists have been also wits; yet the 
two fall, on the whole, into tolerably well-marked classes^ 
and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probablyj en- 
able most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to 
which each famous name in the world's literature belongs* 
Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fields 
ing, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle : widely as these writers differ* 
from each other in style and genius, the least skilled read^ 
er would hardly need to be told that tbe list which includes 
them all is a catalogue of humourists. And Cicero, Lu^ 
cian, Pascal, Voltaire, Congreve, Pope, Sheridan, Courier, 
Sydney Smith — this, I suppose, would be recognized at 
once as an enumeration of wits. Some of these humour^ 
ists, like Fielding, like Richter, like Carlyle, are always, oi 
almost always, humourists alone. Some of these wits, like 
Pascal, like Pope, like Courier, are wits with no, or but 
slight, admixture of humour; and in the classification of 
these there is of course no difficulty at all. But even with 
the wits who very often give us humour also, and with the 
humourists who as often delight us with their wit, we sel- 
dom find ourselves in any doubt as to the real and more 
essential affinities of each. It is not by the wit which h<f 
has infused into his talk, so much as by the humour witf^* 
which he has delineated the character, that Shakspeare* 
has given his Falstaff an abiding place in our memories. 
It is not the repartees of Benedick and Beatrice, but the 
immortal fatuity of Dogberry, that the name of Much Ado 
About Nothing recalls. None of the verbal quips of Touch- 
stone tickle us like his exquisite patronage of William and 



142 STERNE. [chap. 

the fascination which he exercises over the melancholy 
Jaques. And it is the same throughout all Shakspeare. 
It is of the humours of Bottom, and Launce, and Shallow, 
and Sly, and Aguecheek ; it is of the laughter that treads 
upon the heels of horror and pity and awe, as we listen to 
the Porter in Macbeth, to the Grave-digger in Hamlet, to 
the -Fool in Lear — it is of these that we think when we 
think of Shakspeare in any other but his purely poetic mood. 
Whenever, that is to say, we think of him as anything but 
a poet, we think of him, not as a wit, but as a humourist. 
So, too, it is not the dagger- thrusts of the Drapier's Letters, 
but the broad ridicule of the Voyage to Laputa, the savage 
irony of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, that we associate 
with the name of Swift. And, conversely, it is the cold, 
epigrammatic glitter of Congreve's dialogue, the fizz and 
crackle of the fireworks which Sheridan serves out with un- 
discriminating hand to the most insignificant of his charac- 
ters — it is this which stamps the work of these dramatists 
with characteri.stics far more marked than any which be- 
long to them in right of humorous portraiture of human 
foibles or ingenious invention of comic incident. 

The place of Sterne is unmistakably among writers of 
the former class. It is by his humour — his humour of 
character, his dramatic as distinct from his critical ^g- 
^gvv^\avq personal humour — though, of course, he possesses 
this also, as all humourists must — that he lives and will live. 
In Tristram Shandy, as in the Sermons, there is a suflS- 
ciency of wit, and considerably more than a sufficiency of 
humorous reflection, innuendo, and persiflage ; but it is the 
actors in his almost plotless drama who have established 
their creator in his niche in the Temple of Fame. We 
cannot, indeed, be sure that what has given him his hold 
upon posterity is what gave him his popularity with his 



x] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 143 

contemporaries. Oa the contrary, it is, perhaps, more 
probable that he owed his first success with the public of 
his day to those eccentricities which are for us a little too 
consciously eccentric — those artifices which fail a little too 
conspicuously in the ars celandi artem. But however these 
tricks may have pleased in days when such tricks were new, 
they much more often weary than divert us now ; and I 
suspect that many a man whose delioht in the Corporal 
and his master, in Bridget and her mistress, is as fresh as 
ever, declines to accompany their creator in those perpet- 
ual digressions into nonsense or semi-nonsense the fashion 
of which Sterne borrowed from Rabelais, without Rabe- 
lais's excuse for adopting it. To us of this day the real 
charm and distinction of the book is due to the marvellous 
combination of vigour and subtlety in its portrayal of 
character, and in the purity and delicacy of its humour. 
Those last two apparently paradoxical substantives are 
chosen advisedly, and employed as the most convenient 
way of introducing that disagreeable question which no 
commentator on Sterne can possibly shirk, but which ev- 
ery admirer of Sterne must approach with reluctance. 
There is, of course, a sense in which Sterne's humour — 
if, indeed, we may bestow that name on the form of jocu- 
larity to which I refer — is the very reverse of pure and 
delicate : a sense in which it is impure and indelicate in 
the highest degree. On this it is necessary, however brief- 
ly, to touch ; and to the weighty and many-counted in- 
dicftment which may be framed against Sterne on this 
head there is, of course, but one possible plea — the plea 
of guilty. Nay, the plea must go further than a mere 
admission of the offence ; it must include an admission 
of the worst motive, the worst spirit as animating the of- 
fender. It is not necessary to my purpose, nor doubtless 



144 STERNE. [chap. 

congenial to the taste of the reader, that I should enter 
upon any critical analysis of this quality in the author's 
work, or compare him in this respect with the two oth- 
er great humourists who have been the worst offenders 
in the same way. In one of those highly interesting criti- 
cisms of English literature which, even when they most 
conspicuously miss the mark, are so instructive to English- 
men, M. Taine has instituted an elaborate comparison — very 
much, I need hardly say, to the advantage of the latter — 
between the indecency of Swift and that of Rabelais — 
that " good giant," as his countryman calls him, ** who 
rolls himself joyously about on his dunghill, thinking no 
evil," And no doubt the world of literary moralists will 
always be divided upon the question — one mainly of na- 
tional temperament — whether mere animal spirits or seri- 
ous satiric purpose is the best justification for offences 
against cleanliness. It is, of course, only the former theo- 
ry, if either, which could possibly avail Sterne, and it would 
need an unpleasantly minute analysis of this characteristic 
in his writings to ascertain how far M. Taine's eloquent 
defence of Rabelais could be made applicable to his case. 
But the inquiry, one is glad to think, is as unnecessary as 
it would be disagreeable ; for, unfortunately for Sterne, he 
must be condemned on a quantitative comparison of inde- 
cency, whatever may be his fate when compared with 
these other two great writers as regards the qualit}^ of 
their respective transgressions. There can be no denying, 
I mean, that Steme is of all writers the most permeated 
and penetrated with impurity of thought and suggestion ; 
that in no other writer is its latent presence more con- 
stantly felt, even if there be any in whom it is more often 
openly obtruded. The unclean spirit pursues him every- 
where, disfiguring his scenes of humour, demoralizing his 



X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 145 

passages of serious reflection, debasing even his senti- 
mental interludes. His coarseness is very often as great 
a blot on his art as on his morality — a thing which can 
very rarely be said of either Swift or Rabelais; and it is 
sometimes so distinctly fatal a blemish from the purely 
literary point of view, that one is amazed at the critical 
faculty w^hich could have tolerated its presence. 

But when all this has been said of Sterne's humour it 
still remains true that, in another sense of the words " puri- 
ty " and " delicacy," he possesses humour more pure and 
delicate than, perhaps, any other writer in the world can 
show. For if that humour is the purest and most deli- 
cate which is the freest from any admixture of farce, and 
produces its effects with the lightest touch, and the least 
obligations to ridiculous incident, or what may be called 
the "physical grotesque," in any shape — then one can 
point to passages from Sterne's pen which, for fulfilment 
of these conditions, it would be difficult to match else- 
where. Strange as it may seein to say this of the literary 
Gilray who drew the portrait of Dr. Slop, and of the liter- 
ary Grimaldi who tormented Phutatorius with the hot 
chestnut, it is nevertheless the fact that scene after scene 
may be cited from Tristram Shandy^ and those the most 
delightful in the book, which are not only free from even 
the momentary intrusion of either the clown or the carica- 
turist, but even from the presence of " comic properties " 
(as actors would call them) of any kind: scenes of which 
the external setting is of the simplest possible character, 
while the humour is of that deepest and most penetrative 
kind which springs from the eternal incongruities of hu- 
man nature, the ever -recurring cross -purposes of human 
lives. 

Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great 
7* 



146 STERNE. [chap. 

humourists of the world ; and from one, and that the 
most important, point of view the praise is not extrava- 
gant. By no other writer besides Sterne, perhaps, since 
the days of the Spanish humourist, have the vast incon- 
gruities of human character been set forth with so mas- 
terly a hand. It is in virtue of the new insight which his 
humour opens to us of the immensity and variety of man's 
life that Cervantes makes us feel that he is great : not 
delightful merely — not even eternally delightful only, and 
secure of immortality through the perennial human need 
of joy — but great ^ but immortal, in right of that which 
makes Shakspeare and the Greek dramatists immortal, 
namely, the power, not alone over the pleasure-loving part 
of man's nature, but over that equally universal but more 
enduring element in it, his emotions of wonder and of 
awe. It is to this greater power — this control over a 
greater instinct than the human love of joy, that Cer- 
vantes owes his greatness ; and it will be found, though it 
may seem at first a hard saying, that Sterne shares this 
power with* Cervantes. To pass from Quixote and Sancho 
to Walter and Toby Shandy involves, of course, a startling 
change of dramatic key — a notable lowering of dramatic 
tone. It is almost like passing from poetry to prose: it 
is certainly passing from the poetic in spirit and surround- 
ings to the profoundly prosaic in fundamental conception 
and in every individual detail. But those who do not 
allow accidental and external dissimilarities to obscure for 
them the inward and essential resemblances of things, 
must often, I think, have experienced from one of the 
Shandy dialogues the same sort of impression that they 
derive from some of the most nobly humorous colloquies 
between the knight and his squire, and must have been 
conscious through all outward differences of key and tone 



X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 147 

of a common element in each. It is, of course, a resem- 
blance of relations and not of personalities ; for though 
there is something of the Knight of La Mancha in Mr. 
Shandy, there is nothing of Sancho about his brother. 
But the serio-comic game of cross-purposes is the same 
between both couples ; and what one may call the irony 
of human intercourse is equally profound, and pointed 
with equal subtlety, in each. In the Spanish romance, of 
course, it is not likely to be missed. It is enough in itself 
that the deranged brain which takes windmills for giants, 
and carriers for knights, and Rosinante for a Bucephalus, 
has fixed upon Sancho Panza — the crowning proof of its 
mania — as the fitting squire of a knight-errant. To him 
— to this compound of somnolence, shrewdness, and good 
nature — to this creature with no more tincture of romantic 
idealism than a wine-skin, the knight addresses, without 
misgiving, his lofty dissertations on the glories and the 
duties of .chivalry — the squire responding after his fash- 
ion. And thus these two hold converse, contentedly in- 
comprehensible to each other, and with no suspicion that 
they are as incapable of interchanging ideas as the in- 
habitants of two different planets. With what heart- 
stirring mirth, and yet with what strangely deeper feel- 
ing of the infinite variety of human nature, do we follow 
their converse throughout ! Yet Quixote and Sancho are 
not more life-like and human, nor nearer together at one 
point and farther apart at another, than are Walter 
Shandy and his brother. The squat little Spanish peasant 
is not more gloriously incapable of following the chivalric 
vagaries of his master than the simple soldier is of grasp- 
ing the philosophic crotchets of his brother. Both couples 
are in sympathetic contact absolute and complete at one 
point ; at another they are " poles asunder " both of them. 



148 STERNE. [chap. 

And in both contrasts there is that sense of futilitv and 
failure, of alienation and misunderstanding — that element 
of underlying pathos, in short, which so strangely gives its 
keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is the same 
suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite 
of resemblance — of the Incommensurable in man and nat- 
ure, beside which all minor uniformities sink into insig- 
nificance. 

The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the 
humour is, of course, produced in the two cases in two 
exactly opposite ways. In both cases it is a picture of 
human simplicity — of a noble and artless nature out of 
harmony with its surroundings — which moves us ; but 
whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of 
the incompris, in the English novel it is that of the man 
with whom the incompris consorts. If there is pathos as 
well as humour, and deepening the humour, in the figure 
of the distraught knight-errant talking so hopelessly over 
the head of his attached squire's morality, so too there is 
pathos, giving depth to the humour of the eccentric phi- 
losopher, shooting so hopelessly wide of the intellectual 
appreciation of the most affectionate of brothers. One's 
sympathy, perhaps, is even more strongly appealed to in 
the latter than in the former case, because the effort of the 
good Captain to understand is far greater than that of the 
Don to make himself understood, and the concern of the 
former at his failure is proportionately more marked than 
that of the latter at his. And the general rapport between 
one of the two ill-assorted pairs is much closer than that 
of the other. It is, indeed, the tantalizing approach to a 
mutual understanding which gives so much more subtle 
a zest to the humour of the relations between the two 
brothers Shandy than to that which arises out of the re- 



X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 149 

lations between the philosopher and his wife. The broad 
comedy of the dialogues between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy is 
irresistible in its way : but it is broad comedy. The 
philosopher knows that his wife does not comprehend 
bim : she knows that she never will ; and neither of them 
much cares. The husband snubs her openly for her mental 
defects, and she with perfect placidity accepts his rebukes. 
" Master," as he once complains, ** of one of the finest 
chains of reasoning in the world, he is unable for the soul 
of him to get a single link of it into the head of his wife ;" 
but we never hear him lamenting in this serio-comic fash- 
ion over his brother's inability to follow his processes of 
reason ino^. That is too serious a matter with both of 
them ; their mutual desire to share each other's ideas and 
tastes is too strong ; and each time that the philosopher 
shows his impatience with the soldier's fortification-hobby, 
or the soldier breaks his honest shins over one of the phi- 
losopher's crotchets, the regret and remorse on either side 
is equally acute and sincere. It must be admitted, how- 
ever, that Captain Shandy is the one who the more fre- 
quently subjects himself to pangs of this sort, and who is 
the more innocent sufferer of the two. 

From the broad and deep humour of this central con- 
ception of contrast flow as from a head- water innumerable 
rills of comedy through many and many a page of dia- 
logue ; but not, of course, from this source alone. Uncle 
Toby is ever delightful, even when his brother is not near 
him as his foil ; the faithful Corporal brings out another 
side of his character, upon which we linger with equal 
pleasure of contemplation ; the allurements of the Widow 
Wadman reveal him to us in yet another — but always in a 
captivating aspect. There is, too, one need hardly say, an 
abundance of humour, of a high, though not the highest, 



150 STERNE. [chap. 

order in the minor characters of the story — in Mrs. Shan- 
dy, in the fascinating widow, and even, under the coarse 
lines of the physical caricature, in the keen little Catholic, 
Slop himself. But it is in Toby Shandy alone that hu- 
mour reaches that supreme level which it is only capable 
of attaining when the collision of contrasted qualities in a 
human character produces a corresponding conflict of the 
emotions of mirth and tenderness in the minds of those 
who contemplate it. 

This, however, belongs more rightfully to the considera- 
tion of the creative and dramatic element in Sterne's gen- 
ius; and an earlier place in the analysis is claimed by 
that power over the emotion of pity upon which Sterne, 
beyond question, prided himself more highly than upon 
any other of his gifts. He preferred, w^e can plainly see, 
to think of himself, not as the great humourist, but as the 
great sentimentalist; and though the word *' sentiment" 
had something even in his day of the depreciatory mean- 
ing which distinguishes it nowadays from "" pathos," there 
can be little doubt that the thing appeared to Sterne to be, 
on the whole, and both in life and literature, rather admi- 
rable than the reverse. 

What, then, were his notions of true " sentiment " in 
literature? We have seen elsewhere that he repeats — it 
w^ould appear unconsciously — and commends the canon 
which Horace propounds to the tragic poet in the words : 

" Si vis me flere, dolendum 
Primum ipsi tibi : tunc tua me infortunia laedeiit." 

And that canon is sound enough, no doubt, in the sense 
in which it was meant, and in its relation to the person to 
whom it was addressed. A tragic drama, peopled with 
heroes who set forth their w^oes in frigid and unimpas- 



x] HUMOUR AXD SENTIMEXT. 151 

sioned verse, will unquestionably leave its audience as cold 
a:> itself. Nor is this true of drama alone. All poetry^ 
indeed, whether dramatic or other, presupposes a sympa- 
thetic unity of emotion between the poet and those whom 
he addresses ; and to this extent it is obviously true that 
he must feel before they can. Horace, who was (what 
every literary critic is not) a man of the world and an 
observer of human nature, did not, of course, mean that 
this capacity for feeling was all, or even the chief part, of 
the poetic faculty. He must have seen many an '* intense" 
young Roman make that pathetic error of the young in all 
countries and of all periods — the error of mistaking the 
capacity of emotion for th^ gift of expression. He did, 
however, undoubtedly mean that a poet's power of affect- 
ing others presupposes passion in himself ; and, as regards 
the poet, he was right. But his criticism takes no account 
whatever of one form of appeal to the emotions which has 
been brought by later art to a high pitch of perfection, 
but witli which the personal feeling of the artist has not 
much more to do than the *' passions" of an auctioneer's 
clerk have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A 
poet himself, Horace wrote for poets ; to him the pathetic 
implied the ideal, the imaginative, the rhetorical ; he lived 
before the age of Realism and the Realists, and would 
scarcely have comprehended either the men or the method 
if he could have come across them. Had he done so, how- 
ever, he would have been astonished to find his canon re- 
versed, and to have perceived that the primary condition 
of the realist's success, and the distinctive note of those 
writers who have pressed genius into the service of real- 
ism, is that they do not share — that they are unalterably 
and ostentatiously free from — the emotions to which they 
appeal in their readers. A fortunate accident has enabled 



152 STERNE. [chap. 

us to compare the treatment whicli the world's greatest 
tragic poet and its greatest master of realistic tragedy have 
respectively applied to virtually the same subject ; and the 
two methods are never likely to be again so impressively 
contrasted as in King Lear and Le Pere Goriot, But, in 
truth, it must be impossible for any one who feels Balzac's 
power not to feel also how it is heightened by Balzac's 
absolute calm — a calm entirely different from that stern 
composure which was merely a point of style and not an 
attitude of the heart with the old Greek tragedians — a 
calm which, unlike theirs, insulates, so to speak, and is in- 
tended to insulate, the writer, to the end that his individu- 
ality, of which only the electric current of sympathy evei- 
makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the charac- 
ters of the drama stand forth the more life-like from the 
complete concealment of the hand that moves them. 

Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew noth- 
ing, and his canon only applies to it by the rule of contra- 
ries. Undoubtedly, and in spite of the marvels which one 
great genius has wrought with it, it is a form lower than 
the poetic — essentially a prosaic, and in many or most 
hands an unimaginative, form of art ; but for this very rea- 
son^ that it demands nothing of its average practitioner 
but a keen eye for facts, great and small, and a knack of 
graphically recording them, it has become a far more com- 
monly and successfully cultivated form of art than any 
other. As to the question who are its practitioners, it 
would, of course, bd the merest dogmatism to commit 
one's self to any attempt at rigid classification in such a 
matter. There are few if any writers who can be describ- 
ed without qualification either as realists or as idealists. 
Nearly all of them, probably, are realists at one moment 
and in one mood, and idealists at other moments and in 



X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 153 

other moods. All that need be insisted on is that the 
methods of the two forms of art are essentially distinct, 
and that artistic failure must result from any attempt to 
combine them ; for, whereas the primary condition of suc- 
cess in the one case is that the reader should feel the sym- 
pathetic presence of the writer, the primary condition of 
success in the other is that the writer should efface him- 
self from the reader's consciousness altogether. And it is, 
I think, the defiance of these conditions which explains 
why so much of Sterne's deliberately pathetic writing iz, 
from the artistic point of view, a failure. It is this which 
makes one feel so much of it to be strained, ^ii6. unnatural, 
and which brings it to pass that scrne of his most ambi- 
tious efforts leave the reader indifferent, or even now and 
then contemptuous. In those passages of pathos in which 
the effect is distinctly sought by realistic means Sterne is 
perpetually ignoring the " self-denying ordinance " of his 
adopted method — perpetually obtruding his own individu- 
ality, and begging us, as it were, to turn from the picture 
to the artist, to cease gazing for a moment at his touching 
creation, and to admire the fine feeling, the exquisitely 
sympathetic nature of the mart who created it. No doubt, 
as we muvst in fairness remember, it was part of his " hu- 
mour " — in Ancient Pistol's sense of the word — to do this ; 
it is true, no doubt (and a truth which Sterne's most fa- 
mous critic was too prone to ignore), that his sentiment is 
not always meant for serious ;^ nay, the very word '* senti- 

^ Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage about 
the desohhgeante^ which had been " standing so many months unpitied 
in the corner of Monsieur Dessein's coach-yard. Much, indeed, was 
not to be said for it, but something might ; and, when a few words 
will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a 
churl of them," " Does anybody," asks Thackeray in strangely mat- 
L 



154 STERNE. [chap. 

mental" itself, though in Sterne's day, of course, it had 
acquired but a part of its present disparaging significance, 
is a sufficient proof of that. But there are, nevertheless, 
plenty of passages, both in Tristram Shandy and the Sen- 
timental Journey, where the intention is wholly and un- 
mixedly pathetic — where the smile is not for a moment 
meant to compete with the tear — which are, nevertheless, 
it must be owned, complete failures, and failures traceable 
with much certainty, or so it seems to me, to the artistic 
error above-mentioned. 

In one famous case, indeed, the failure can hardly be de- 
scribed as other than ludicrous. The figure of the dis- 
traught Maria of Mouliues is tenderly drawn ; the accesso- 
ries of the picture — her goat, her dog, her pipe, her song 
to the Virgin — though a little theatrical, perhaps, are skil- 
fully touched in ; and so long as the Sentimental Traveller 
keeps our attention fixed upon her and them the scene 
prospers well enough. But, after having bidden us duly 
note how *Hhe tears trickled down her cheeks," the Trav- 
eller continues : " I sat down close by her, and Maria let 
me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief. 
I then steeped it in my own — and then in hers — and then 
in mine — and then I wiped hers again ; and as I did it I 
felt such undescribable emotions within me as, I am sure, 
could not be accounted for from any combinations of mat- 
ter and motion." The reader of this may well ask him- 
self in wonderment whether he is really expected to make 

ter-of-fact fashion, "believe that this is a real sentiment? that this 
hixury of generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery — out of an old 
cab — is genuine feeling?" Nobody, we should say. But, on the 
other hand, does anybody — or did anybody before Thackeray — sug- 
gest that it Avas meant to pass for genuine feeling ? Is it not an ob- 
vious piece of mock pathetic ? 



X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 155 

a third in the lachrymose group. We look at the passage 
again, and more carefully, to see if, after all, we may not 
be intended to laugh, and not to cry at it ; but on finding, 
as clearly appears, that we actually are intended to cry at 
it the temptation to laugh becomes almost irresistible. 
We proceed, however, to the account of Maria's wander- 
ings to Rome and back, and we come to the pretty passage 
which follows : 

" How she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could 
not tell ; but God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb. 
Shorn indeed ! and to the quick, said I ; and wast thou in my own 
land, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter thee ; 
thou shouldst eat of my own bread and drink of my own cup ; I 
would be kind to thy Sylvio ; in all thy weaknesses and wanderings 
I would seek after thee, and bring thee back. When the sun went 
down I would say my prayers ; and when I had done thou shouldst 
play thy evening-song upon thy pipe ; nor would the incense of my 
sacrifice be worse accepted for entering heaven along with that of a 
broken heart." 

But then follows more whimpering : 

" Nature melted within me [continues Sterne] as I said this ; and 
Maria observing, as I took out my handkerchief, that it was steeped 
too much already to be of use, would needs go wash it in the stream. 
And where will you dry it, Maria ? said I. I'll dry it in my bosom, 
said she ; 'twill do me good. And is your heart still so warm, Maria ? 
said I. I touched upon the string on which hung all her sorrows. 
She looked with wistful disorder for some time in my face ; and then, 
without saying anything, took her pipe and played her service to the 
Virgin." 

Which are we meant to look at — the sorrows of Maria ? 
or the sensibilities of the Sentimental Traveller? or the 
condition of the pocket-handkerchief? I think it doubt- 
ful whether any writer of the first rank has ever perpe- 
trated so disastrous a literary failure as this scene ; but the 



156 STERNE. [chap. 

main cause of that failure appears to me not doubtful at 
all. The artist has no business within the frame of the 
picture, and his intrusion into it has spoilt it. The method 
adopted from the commencement is ostentatiously objec- 
tive : we are taken straight into Maria's presence, and bid- 
den to look at and to pity the unhappy maiden as de- 
scribed by the Traveller who met her. No attempt is 
made to place us at the outset in sympathy with him ; he, 
until he thrusts himself before us, with his streaming eyes, 
and his drenched pocket-handkerchief, is a mere reporter 
of the scene before him, and he and his tears are as much 
out of place as if he were the compositor who set up the 
type. It is not merely that we don't want to know how 
the scene affected him, and that we resent as an imperti- 
nence the elaborate account of his tender emotions; we 
don't wish to be reminded of his presence at all. For, as 
we can know nothing (effectively) of Maria's sorrows ex- 
cept as given in her appearance — the historical recital of 
them and their cause being too curt and bald to be able 
to move us — the best chance for moving our compassion 
for her is to make the illusion of her presence as dramati- 
cally real as possible ; a chance which is, therefore, com- 
pletely destroyed when the author of the illusion insists 
on thrusting himself between ourselves and the scene. 

But, in truth, this whole episode of Maria of Moulines 
was, like more than one of Sterne's efforts after the pa- 
thetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions of 
its birth. These abortive efforts are no natural growth 
of his artistic genius; they proceed rather from certain 
morbidly stimulated impulses of his moral nature which 
he forced his artistic genius to subserve. He had true 
pathetic power, simple yet subtle, at his command; but 
it visited him unsought, and by inspiration from without. 



X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. im 

It came when he was in the dramatic and not in the in- 
trospective mood ; when he was thinking honestly of his 
characters, and not of himself. But he was, unfortunately, 
too prone — and a long course of moral self-indulgence 
had confirmed him in it— to the habit of caressing his 
own sensibilities ; and the result of this was always to set 
him upon one of those attempts to be pathetic of malice 
prepense of which Maria of Moulines is one example, and 
the too celebrated dead donkey of Nampont another. " It 
is agreeably and skilfully done, that dead jackass," writes 
Thackeray ; " like M. de Soubise's cook on the campaign, 
Sterne dresses it, and serves it up quite tender, and with 
a very piquante sauce. But tears, and fine feelings, and 
a white pocket-handkerchief, and a funeral sermon, and 
horses and feathers, and a procession of mutes, and a 
hearse with a dead donkey inside ! Psha ! Mounte- 
bank ! I'll not give thee one penny-piece for that trick, 
donkey and all." That is vigorous ridicule, and not whol- 
ly undeserved ; but, on the other hand, not entirely de- 
served. There is less of artistic trick, it seems to me, and 
more of natural foible, about Sterne's literary sentiment 
than Thackeray was ever willing to believe ; and I can find 
nothing worse, though nothing better, in the dead ass of 
Nampont than in Maria of Moulines. I do not think there 
is any conscious simulation of feeling in this Nampont 
scene ; it is that the feeling itself is overstrained — that 
Sterne, hugging, as usual, his own sensibilities, mistook 
their value in expression for the purposes of art. The 
Sentimental Traveller does not obtrude himself to the 
same extent as in the scene at Moulines ; but a little con- 
sideration of the scene will show how much Sterne re- 
lied on the mere presentment of the fact that here was 
an unfortunate peasant who had lost his dumb companion. 



158 STERNE. [chap. 

and here a tender-hearted gentleman looking on and pity- 
ing him. As for any attempts to bring out, by objective 
dramatic touches, either the grievousness of the bereave- 
ment or the grief of the mourner, such attempts as are 
made to do this are either commonplace or " one step in 
advance " of the sublime. Take this, for instance : ** The 
mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door, with 
his ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took 
up from time to time, then laid them down, looked at 
them, and shook his head. He then took the crust of 
bread out of his wallet again, as if to eat it ; held it some 
time in his hand, then laid it upon the bit of his ass's 
bridle — looked wistfully at the little arrangement he had 
made — and then gave a sigh. The simplicity of his grief 
drew numbers about him," &c. Simplicity, indeed, of a 
marvellous sort which could show itself by so extraordina- 
ry a piece of acting as this ! Is there any critic who candid- 
ly thinks it natural — I do not mean in the sense of mere 
e very-day probability, but of conformity to the laws of hu- 
man character? Is it true that in any country, among any 
people, however emotional, grief — real, unaffected, un-self- 
conscious grief — ever did or ever could display itself by 
such a trick as that of laying a piece of bread on the bit 
of a dead ass's bridle? Do we not feel that if we had 
been on the point of offering comfort or alms to the 
mourner, and saw him go through this extraordinary piece 
of pantomime, we should have buttoned up our hearts 
and pockets forthwith ? Sentiment, again, sails very near 
the wind of the ludicrous in the reply to the Traveller's 
remark that the mourner had been a merciful master to 
the dead ass. ** Alas !" the latter says, " I thought so when 
he was alive, but now that he is dead I think otherwise. 
I fear the weight of myself and my afflictions have been 



X.] HTMOUR AND SEXTIMEXT. 159 

too much for hira." And the scene ends flatly enough 
with the scrap of morality: "'Shame on the world!' said 
I to myself. ' Did we love each other as this poor soul 
loved his ass, 'twould be something.' " 

The whole incident, in short, is one of those examples 
of the deliberate-pathetic with which Sterne's highly natural 
art had least, and his highly artificial nature most, to do. 
He is never so unsuccessful as when, after formally announc- 
ing, as it were, that he means to be touching, he proceeds 
to select his subject, to marshal his characters, to group his 
accessories, and with painful and painfully apparent elabo- 
ration to work up his scene to the weeping point. There is 
no obviousness of suggestion, no spontaneity of treatment 
about this " Dead Ass " episode ; indeed, there is some 
reason to believe that it was one of those most hopeless of 
efforts — the attempt at the mechanical repetition of a form- 
er triumph. It is by no means improbable, at any rate, that 
the dead ass of Nampont owes its presence in the Senti- 
mentalJotirney to the reception met with by the live ass of 
Lyons in the seventh volume of Tristram Shandy. And yet 
what an astonishing difference between the two sketches ! 

" 'Twas a poor ass, who had just turned in, with a couple of large 
panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and cab- 
bage-leaves, and stood dubious with his two fore-feet on the inside of 
the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not 
knowing very well whether he would go in or no. Xow, 'tis an ani- 
mal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike. There is a 
patient endurance of sufferings wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and 
carriage, which pleads so mightily for him that it always disarms me, 
and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to him ; on 
the contrary, meet him where I will, in town or country, in cart or 
under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever something 
civil to say to him on my part ; and, as one word begets another (if 
he has as Uttle to do as I), I generally fall into conversation with him ; 



160 STERNE. [chap. 

and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his re- 
sponses from the etchings of his countenance — and where those 
carry me not deep enough, in flying from my own heart into his, 
and feeling what is natural for an ass to think, as well as a man, 
upon the occasion. . . . Come, Honesty ! said I, seeing it was im- 
practicable to pass betwixt him and the gate, art thou for coming in 
or going out ? The ass twisted his head round, to look up the street. 
Well, replied I, we'll wait a minute for thy driver. He turned his 
head thoughtfully about, and looked wistfully the opposite way. I 
understand thee perfectly, answered I : if thou takest a wrong step 
in this affair he will cudgel thee to death. Well, a minute is but a 
minute, and if it saves a fellow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be 
set down as ill spent. He was eating the stem of an artichoke as 
this discourse went on, and, in the little peevish contentions of nat- 
ure betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropped it out of his 
mouth half a dozen times, and picked it up again. God help thee, 
Jack ! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on't, and many a bitter 
blow, I fear, for its wages — 'tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever 
life is to others. And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is 
as bitter, I dare say, as soot (for he had cast aside the stem), and 
thou hast not a friend, perhaps, in all this world that will give thee a 
macaroon. In saying this I pulled out a paper of 'em, which I had 
just purchased, and gave him one; and, at this moment that I am 
telhng it, my heart smites me that there was more of pleasantry in 
the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon, than of be- 
nevolence in giving him one, which presided in the act. When the 
ass had eaten his macaroon I pressed him to come in. The poor 
beast was heavy loaded, his legs seemed to tremble under him, he 
hung rather backwards, and as I pulled at his halter it broke short 
in my hand. He looked up pensive in my face. ' Don't thrash me 
with it ; but if you will, you may.' * If I do,' said I, ' I'll be d d.'" 

Well might Thackeray say of this passage that, "the 
critic who refuses to see in it wit, humour, pathos, a kind 
nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard in- 
deed to move and to please." It is, in truth, excellent; 
and its excellence is due to its possessing nearly every one 
of those qualities, positive and negative, which the two 



X.] HUMOUR AND SEXTIMEXT. 161 

other scenes above quoted are without. The author does 
not here obtrude himself, does not importune us to admire 
his exquisitely compassionate nature ; on the contrary, he 
at once amuses us and enlists our sympathies by that 
subtly humorous piece of self-analysis, in which he shows 
how large an admixture of curiosity was contained in his 
benevolence. The incident, too, is well chosen. No forced 
concurrence of circumstances brino-s it about : it is such as 
any man might have met with anywhere in his travels, and 
it is handled in a simple and manly fashion. , The reader 
is with the writer throughout ; and their common mood of 
half-humorous pity is sustained, unforced, but unbroken, 
from first to last. 

One can hardly say as much for another of the much- 
quoted pieces from the Sentimental Journey — the descrip- 
tion of the caged starling. The passage is ingeniously 
w^orked into its context ; and if we wet^e to consider it as 
only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden and dra- 
matic discomfiture of the Traveller's somewhat inconsider- 
ate moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough. 
But, regarded as a substantive appeal to one's emotions, 
it is open to the criticisms which apply to most other of 
Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the pathetic. The de- 
tails of the picture are too much insisted on, and there is 
too much of self-consciousness in the artist. Even at the 
very close of the story of Le Fevre's death — finely told 
though, as a whole, it is — there is a jarring note. Even 
while the dying man is breathing his last our sleeve is 
twitched as we stand at his bedside, and our attention 
forcibly diverted from the departing soldier to the literary 
ingenuities of the man who is describing his end : 

" There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of famil- 
iarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and 
8 



162 STERNE. [chap. 

showed you the goodness of his nature. To this there was something 
in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beck- 
oned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him ; so that 
before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind oifers he was mak- 
ing to the father had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, 
and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it to- 
wards him. The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing 
cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, 
the heart, rallied back ; the film forsook his eyes for a moment ; he 
looked up wishfully in my Uncle Toby's face, then cast a look upon 
his boy — and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken." 

How excellent all that is ! and how perfectly would the 
scene have ended had it closed with the tender and poetic 
image which thus describes the dying soldier's commenda- 
tion of his orphan boy to the care of his brother-in-arms ! 
But what of this, which closes the scene, in fact ? 

" Nature instantly ebbed again ; the film returned to its place ; the 
pulse fluttered — stoppM — went on — throbbed — stopped again — 
moved, stopped. Shall I go on ? No." 

Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it 
seems to spoil a touching and simple death-bed scene by a 
piece of' theatrical trickery. 

The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, 
that the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself — the 
acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordi- 
nary complacency, were, as has been before observed, the 
weakness, and not the strength, of his pathetic style. 
When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is survey- 
ing his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and 
above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender hu- 
mour to play upon them unrestrained, he can touch the 
springs of compassionate emotion in us with a potent and 
unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is uppermost — 



X.] HUMOUR AND SEXTIMKN^T. 16? 

when he is lookino: inward and not outward, contemplating 
his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his 
cunning fails hira altogether. He is at his best in pathos 
when he is most the humourist; or rather, we may almost 
say, his pathos is never good unless when it is closely in- 
terwoven with his humour. In this, of course, there is 
nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, that a man 
who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and 
deepest sense, should seem to have so little understood how 
near together lie the sources of tears and laughter on the 
very way-side of man's mysterious life. 



CHAPTER XL 

CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER. PLACE IN ENGLISH 

LITERATURE. 

Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper 
moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent 
gift from which they sprang^ and perhaps to only one spe- 
cial display of that gift, that he owes his immortality. We 
are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last hyperbolic 
honour — hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking 
of a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision 
far enough forward through time — that the comparative 
ease with which it is to be earned has itself come to be 
exaggerated. There are so many " deathless ones " about 
-=-if I may put the matter familiarly — in conversation and 
in literature, that w^e get into the way of thinking that 
they are really a considerable body in actual fact, and that 
the works which have triumphed over death are far more 
numerous still. The real truth, however, is, that not only 
are " those who reach posterity a very select company in- 
deed," but most of them have come much nearer missing 
their destiny than is popularly supposed. Of the dozen or 
score of writers in one century whom their own contem- 
poraries fondly decree immortal, one-half, perhaps, may be 
remembered in the next; while of the creations which 
were honoured with the diploma of immortality a very 



CHAP. XL] CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER. 165 

much smaller proportion as a rule survive. Only some 
fifty per cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the 
goal ; and often even upon their brows there flutter but a 
few stray leaves of the bay. A single poem, a solitary 
drama — nay, perhaps one isolated figure, poetic or dra- 
matic — avails, and but barely avails, to keep the immortal 
from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no 
disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much 
in virtue of his creative power as of one great individual 
creation. His imaginative insight into character in gen- 
eral was, no doubt, considerable; his draughtsmanship, 
whether as exhibited in the rough sketch or in the finished 
portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous ; but an artist 
may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for 
one that will linger in the memory of those who have gazed 
upon it ; and it is, after all, I think, the one figure of Cap- 
tain Tobias Shandy which has graven itself indelibly on 
the memory of mankind. To have made this single addi- 
tion to the imperishable types of human character em- 
bodied in the world's literature may seem, as has been said, 
but a light matter to those who talk with light exaggera- 
tion of the achievements of the literary artist ; but if we 
exclude that one creative prodigy among men, who has 
peopled a whole gallery with imaginary beings more real 
than those of flesh and blood, we shall find that very few 
archetypal creations have sprung from any single hand. 
Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guile- 
less good nature, of affectionate simplicity, as Hamlet is of 
irresolution, or lago of cunning, or Shylock of race-hatred ; 
and he contrives to preserve all the characteristics of an 
ideal type amid surroundings of intensely prosaic realism, 
with which he himself, moreover, considered as an individ- 
ual character in a specific story, is in complete accord. If 



lt)6 STERNE. [chap. 

any one be disposed to underrate the creative and dramatic 
power to which this testifies, let him consider how it has 
commonly fared with those writers of prose fiction who 
have attempted to personify a virtue in a man. Take the 
work of another famous English humourist and sentimen- 
talist, and compare Uncle Toby's manly and dignified gen- 
tleness of heart with the unreal " gush " of the Brothers 
Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. 
We do not believe in the former, and we cannot but de- 
spise the latter. But Captain Shandy is reality itself, 
within and without ; and though we smile at his naivete, 
and may even laugh outright at his boyish enthusiasm for 
his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a 
moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic 
aspects of his character ; there could not be, of course, for 
Sterne needed him more, and used him more, for his pur- 
poses as a humourist than for his purposes as a sentimen- 
talist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he deliber- 
ately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Cap- 
tain is the least delightful ; it is then that the hand loses 
its cunning, and the stroke strays ; it is then, and only 
then, that the benevolence of the good- soldier seems to 
verge, though ever so little, upon affectation. It is a pity, 
for instance, that Sterne should, in illustration of Captain 
Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized (as he is said 
to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly, caught 
and put out of the window with the words "Get thee 
gone, poor devil ! Why should I harm thee ? The world 
is surely large enough for thee and me." There is some- \ 
thing too much of self-conscious virtue in the apostrophe. 1 
This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of Sterne's objec- 
tive mood ; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying sen- 
timentalist, surveying his character through the false me- 



Xi.] CREATIVE AISD DRAMATIC POWER. 167 

dium of his own hypertrophied sensibilities. These lapses, 
however, are, fortunately, rare. As a rule we see the wor- 
thy Captain only as he appeared to his creator's keen dra- 
matic eye, and as he is set before us in a thousand exqui- 
site touches of dialogue — the man of simple mind and 
soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but 
lacking not in a certain shrewd common-sense ; exquisitely 
naif, and delightfully mal-a-propos in his observations, but 
always pardonably, never foolishly, so ; inexhaustibly ami- 
able, but with no weak amiability ; homely in his ways, 
but a perfect gentleman withal ; in a word, the most win- 
ning and lovable personality that is to be met with, surely, 
in the whole rano-e of fiction. 

It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of char- 
acter as it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular 
passages of sentiment. He is never at his best and truest 
— as, indeed, no writer of fiction ever is or can be — save 
when he is allowing his dramatic imagination to play the 
most freely upon his characters, and thinking least about 
himself. This is curiously illustrated in his handling of 
what is, perhaps, the next most successful of the uncari- 
catured portraits in the Shandy gallery — the presentment 
of the Rev. Mr. Yorick. Nothing can be more perfect in 
its way than the picture of the " lively, witty, sensitive, and 
heedless parson," in chapter x. of the first volume of Tris- 
tram Shandy, We seem to see the thin, melancholy figure 
on the rawboned horse — the apparition which could " nev- 
er present itself in the village but it caught the attention 
of old and young," so that " labour stood still as he passed, 
the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well, the 
spinning-wheel forgot its round ; even chuck-farthing and 
shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he was out of 
sight." Throughout this chapter Sterne, though describ- 



168 STERNE. [chap. 

ing himself, is projecting his personality to a distance, as it 
were, and contemplating it dramatically ; and the resnlt is 
excellent. When in the next chapter he becomes *' lyri- 
cal," so to speak ; when the reflection upon his (largely 
imaginary) wrongs impels him to look inward, the invari- 
able consequence follows ; and though Yorick's much be- 
praised death-scene, with Eugenius at his bed-side, is re- 
deemed from entire failure by an admixture of the humor- 
ous with its attempted pathos, we ask ourselves with some 
wonder what the unhappiness — or the death itself, for 
that matter — is "all about." The wrongs which were 
supposed to have broken Yorick's heart are most imper- 
fectly specified (a comic proof, by the way, of Sterne's 
entire absorption in himself, to the confusion of his own 
personal knowledge with that of the reader), and the first 
conditions of enlisting the reader's sympathies are left un- 
fulfilled. 

But it is comparatively seldom that this foible of Sterne 
obtrudes itself upon the strictly narrative and dramatic 
parts of his work ; and, next to the abiding charm and 
interest of his principal figure, it is by the admirable life 
and colour of his scenes that he exercises his strongest 
powers of fascination over a reader. Perpetual as are 
Sterne's affectations, and tiresome as is his eternal self- 
consciousness when he is speaking in his own person, yet 
when once the dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him 
there is no writer who ever makes us more completely 
forget him in the presence of his characters — none who 
can bring them and their surroundings, their looks and 
words, before us with such convincing force of reality. 
One wonders sometimes whether Sterne himself was aware 
of the high dramatic excellence of many of what actors 
would call his "carpenter's scenes" — the mere interludes 



XI.] CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER. 169 

introduced to amuse us while the stage is being prepared 
for one of those more elaborate and deliberate displays of 
pathos or humour, which do not always turn out to be 
unmixed successes when they come. Sterne prided him- 
self vastly upon the incident of Le Fevre's death ; but I 
dare say that there is many a modern reader who would 
rather have lost this highly-wrought piece of domestic 
drama, than that other exquisite little scene in the kitchen 
of the inn, when Corporal Trim toasts the bread which the 
sick lieutenant's son is preparing for his father's posset, while 
" Mr. Yorick's curate was smoking a pipe by the fire, but 
said not a word, good or bad, to comfort the youth." The 
whole scene is absolute life ; and the dialogue between the 
Corporal and the parson, as related by the former to his 
master, wdth Captain Shandy's comments thereon, is almost 
Shakspearian in its excellence. Says the Corporal : 

*'When the lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast he 
felt himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me 
know that in about ten minutes he should be glad if I would step 
upstairs I believe, said the landlord, he is going to say his pray- 
ers, for there was a book laid on the chair by the bed-side, and as I 
shut the door I saw him take up a cushion. I thought, said the cu- 
rate, that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. Trim, never said your pray- 
ers at all. I heard the poor gentleman say his prayers last night, 
said the landlady, very devoutly, and with my own ears, or I could 
not have beUeved it. Are you sure of it? replied the curate. A 
soldier, an' please your reverence, said I, prays as often (of his own 
accord) as a parson ; and when he is fighting for his king, and for 
his own life, and for his honour too, he has the most reason to pray 
to God of any one in the whole world. 'Twas well said of thee, Trim, 
said my Uncle Toby. But when a soldier, said I, an' please your rev- 
erence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, 
up to his knees in cold water — or engaged, said I, for months togeth- 
er in long and dangerous marches ; harassed, perhaps, in his rear to- 
day ; harassing others to - morrow ; detached here ; countermanded 
M 8* 



I'JO STEKNE. [chap. 

there ; resting this night out upon his arms ; beat up in his shirt the 
next ; benumbed in his joints ; perhaps without straw in his tent to 
kneel on, [he] must say his prayers how and when he can. I be- 
lieve, said I— for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, for the reputation 
of the army — I believe, an't please your reverence, said I, that when 
a soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson — though 
not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said 
that. Trim, said my Uncle Toby ; for God only knows who is a hypo- 
crite and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, 
corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen 
who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we 
shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly. I hope we shall, said Trim. 
It is in the Scripture, said my Uncle Toby, and I will show it thee in 
the morning. In the meantime, we may depend upon it. Trim, for our 
comfort, said my Uncle Toby, that God Almighty is so good and just 
a governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in it, it 
will never be inquired into whether we have done them in a red coat 
or a black one. I hope not, said the Corporal. But go on, said my 
Uncle Toby, with thy story." 

We might almost fancy ourselves listening to that no- 
ble prose colloquy between the disguised king and his 
soldiers on the night before Agincourt, in Henry F. And 
though Sterne does not, of course, often reach this level 
of dramatic dignity, there are passages in abundance in 
which his dialogue assumes, through sheer force of indi- 
vidualized character, if not all the dignity, at any rate all 
the impressive force and simplicity, of the " grand style." 

Taken altogether, however, his place in English letters 
is hard to fix, and his tenure in human memory hard to 
determine. Hitherto he has held his own, with the great 
writers of his era, but it has been in virtue, as I have at- 
tempted to show, of a contribution to the literary posses- 
sions of mankind which is as uniquely limited in amount as 
it is exceptionally perfect in quality. One cannot but feel 
that, as regards the sum of his titles to recollection, his 



XL] PLACE IX ENGLISH LITERATURE. 171 

name stands far below either of those other two which 
in the course of the last century added themselves to 
the highest rank among the classics of English humour. 
Sterne has not the abounding life and the varied human 
interest of Fielding ; and, to say nothing of his vast intel- 
lectuar inferiority to Swift, he never so much as approach- 
es those problems of everlasting concernment to man which 
Swift handles with so terrible a fascination. Certainly no 
enthusiastic Gibbon of the future is ever likely to say of 
Sterne's "pictures of human manners" that they will out- 
live the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of 
the House of Austria. Assuredly no one will ever find in 
this so-called English antitype of the Cure of Meudon 
any of the deeper qualities of that gloomy and command- 
ing spirit which has been finely compared to the " soul of 
Rabelais habitans in sicco,^^ Nay, to descend even to mi- 
nor aptitudes, Sterne cannot tell a story as Swift and Field- 
ing can tell one; and his work is not assured of life as 
To7n Jones and Gulliver's Travels, considered as stories 
alone, would be assured of it, even if the one were strip- 
ped of its cheerful humour, and the other disarmed of its 
savage allegory. And hence it might be rash to predict 
that Sterne's days will be as long in the land of literary 
memory as the two great writers aforesaid. Ranked, as 
he still is, among '^ English classics," he undergoes, I sus- 
pect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share 
of reverential neglect. Among those who talk about him 
he has, I should imagine, fewer readers than Fielding, and 
very much fewer than Swift. Nor is he likely to increase 
their number as time goes on, but rather, perhaps, the con- 
trary. Indeed, the only question is whether with the lapse 
of years he will not, like other writers as famous in their 
day, become yet more of a mere name. For there is still, 



172 . STP]RNE. [chap. 

of course, a further stage to which he may decline. That 
object of so much empty mouth-honour, the English clas- 
sic of the last and earlier centuries, presents himself for 
classification under three distinct categories. There is the 
class who are still read in a certain measure, though in a 
much smaller measure than is pretended, by the great body 
of ordinarily well-educated men. Of this class, the two 
authors whose names I have already cited. Swift and Field- 
ing, are typical examples ; and it may be taken to include 
Goldsmith also. Then comes the class of those whom the 
ordinarily well-educated public, whatever they may pretend, 
read really very little or not at all; and in this class we 
may couple Sterne with Addison, with Smollett, and, ex- 
cept, of course, as to Rohinson Crusoe — unless, indeed, our 
blase boys have outgrown him among other pleasures of 
boyhood— with Defoe. But below this there is yet a third 
class of writers, who are not only read by none but the 
critic, the connoisseur, or the historian of literature, but 
are scarcely read even by them, except from curiosity, or 
** in the way of business." The type of this class is Eich- 
ardson ; and one cannot, I say, help asking w^hether he will 
hereafter have Sterne as a companion of his dusty solitude. 
Are Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey des- 
tined to descend from the second class into the third — 
from the region of partial into that of total neglect, and to 
have their portion with Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles 
Grandison? The unbounded vogue which they enjoyed 
in their time will not save them ; for sane and sober critics 
compared Richardson in his day to Shakspeare, and Dide- 
rot broke forth into prophetic rhapsodies upon the immor- 
tality of his works which to us in these days have become 
absolutely pathetic in their felicity of falsified prediction. 
Seeing, too, that a good three - fourths of the attractions 



XI.] PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. m 

which won Sterne his contemporary popularity are now so 
much dead weight of dead matter, and that the vital re^ 
siduum is in amount so small, the fate of Richardson might 
seem to be but too close behind him. Yet it is difficult to 
believe that this fate will ever quite overtake him. His 
sentiment may have mostly ceased — it probably has ceased 
— to stir any emotion at all in these days ; but there is an 
imperishable element in his humour. And though the 
circle of his readers may have no tendency to increase, one 
can hardly suppose that a charm, which those who still 
feel it feel so keenly, will ever entirely cease to captivate • 
or that time can have any power over a perfumd which so 
wonderfully retains the pungent freshness of its fragrance 
after the lapse of a hundred years. 



THE END. 



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